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Phoenix666 writes:

Babylon Bee:

The nation's nerds woke up in a utopia this morning, one where everyone stays inside, sporting events are being canceled, and all social interaction is forbidden.

All types of nerds, from social introverts to hardcore PC gamers, welcomed the dawn of this new era, privately from their own homes.

"I have been waiting my whole life for this moment," said Ned Pendleton, 32 -- via text message, of course -- as he fired up League of Legends on his beefy gaming PC. "They told me to take up a sport and that the kids playing basketball and stuff were gonna be way more successful than us nerds who played Counter-Strike at LAN parties every weekend."

Always look on the bright side of life.

[Certainly an element of gallows humor, but it does offer a different perspective from the incessant drumbeat of gloom and doom surrounding the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. What "positives" have you seen? --martyb]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bill Gates steps down from Microsoft board to focus on philanthropy

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is stepping down from the company's board to spend more time on philanthropic activities.

He says he wants to focus on global health and development, education and tackling climate change.

One of the world's richest men, Mr Gates, 65, has also left the board of Warren Buffett's massive holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.

Mr Gates stepped down from his day-to-day role running Microsoft in 2008.

Also at CNBC.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Honeywell is rolling out a supercomputer to take on Google and IBM

Honeywell, formerly known for its thermostats, is now rolling out a powerful quantum computer that's been in the works for a decade.

Honeywell says its quantum computer will be even more powerful than those built by big names such as Google and IBM. JPMorgan Chase has signed on as Honeywell's first customer, and the companies will work together to develop quantum computing use cases for the finance business in areas such as fraud detection and artificial intelligence for trading.

[...] The company combined technology expertise from its various areas of business — including high vacuum systems and precision control electronics — to develop the computer. Honeywell also invested in two quantum software development firms that will work with the company and its quantum customers.

"We wanted to be able to shape how quantum computing gets used," Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions, told CNN Business. "We actually want to be our own best customer in this."

Honeywell is already working on quantum computing solutions for its aerospace and materials development businesses, Uttley said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

So how often are smart speakers listening when they shouldn't? A team of researchers at Boston's Northeastern University are conducting an ongoing study to determine just how bad the problem really is. They've set up an experiment to generate unexpected activation triggers and study them inside and out.

The team corralled a group of mainstream smart speakers into a box representing all the major players — four Alexas and one each of her cohorts. We'd love to see them maximize the test subjects by including enough devices of each type to cover all the possible assigned wake words, but that would be pretty expensive.

Then they piped in 125 hours worth of audio from TV shows with rapid-fire dialogue using Netflix. The shows they chose are healthy cross-section of televised entertainment — mostly newer stuff, but some going back a decade or more. Everything from comedy to drama. A video camera trained on the speakers will record any lights that indicate a successful activation. There's also a microphone to pick up anything the devices say in response to the dialogue stream, and a WAP to capture network traffic in and out of the box.

While the results indicate that these devices aren't constantly recording (phew!), they do tend to wake up quite frequently for short periods of time — up to 19 times in a 24-hour period. The worst offenders were the Apple and Microsoft speakers, both of which activated more often than the others. Not all of the activations were short and sweet, though — both the Microsoft Invoke and the Echo Dot had accidental activations lasting up to 43 seconds long. That's plenty of time to record and/or distribute your late-night 16-digit utterances to the QVC operators, or the secret ingredient in your mother-in-law's Quiche Lorraine.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Antiaging biochemical mechanism found in mouse, bat and naked mole rat cells:

Aging is an inevitable part of life, yet some species are aging very differently than others, even than very similar ones.

For example, naked mole rats, east African rodents of a size comparable to moles or mice, show a strongly delayed process of aging and live up to 30 years. Scientists from Russia, Germany and Switzerland have now confirmed a mechanism in mouse, bat and naked mole rat cells—a "mild depolarization" of the inner mitochondrial membrane—that is linked to aging: Mild depolarization regulates the creation of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (mROS) in cells and is therefore a mechanism of the anti-aging program. In mice, this mechanism falls apart at the age of one year, while in naked mole rats, this does not occur until around 20 years. This newly confirmed mechanism is described in detail in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...] The research team was able to show that both biochemical mechanisms do not operate in the same intensity and efficiency in different species and tissues and at different ages: The researchers examined the hexokinases I + II and creatine kinase mechanisms in various tissues (lung, kidney, brain, skeletal muscles, heart, and others) in mice,naked mole rats, and Seba's short-tailed bats.

They found interesting differences: Mild depolarization significantly starts decreasing after one year of age in mice with negligible levels after 24 months in skeletal muscles, diaphragm, heart, brain, and spleen. In lung and kidney tissue, mild depolarization decreases to a lesser extent with aging.

"The crumbling of the anti-aging program in the cells starts after only a third of the average lifespan in mice, while the naked mole rats and Seba's short-tailed bats maintain mild depolarization and hence the suppression of mROS production up to high ages," explain co-authors Thomas Hildebrandt and Susanne Holtze from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW). "This contributes to the extraordinary longevity of these species."

Mikhail Y. Vyssokikh et al. Mild depolarization of the inner mitochondrial membrane is a crucial component of an anti-aging program, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1916414117

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

United Kingdom to introduce Security Labelling on connected devices

In a press release from the UK government on January 27th 2020 called "Government to strengthen security of internet-connected products", the new law and its implications are clearly outlined. The measures taken and plans going forward are indeed promising for the security of consumers of IoT devices in the UK.

One implication of this law is the introduction of a new labeling system. The idea is that similar to how bluetooth and wifi labels help consumers feel confident their products will work with these wireless communication protocols, a Security label will instill confidence in consumers that their device is safe and secure according to standards.

Singapore to introduce Security Labelling on routers and smart home Hubs

Following the UK release, Singapore this week released their Cybersecurity Labelling Scheme. In the announcement it reads:

"Despite the growth in number of IoT products in the market, many consumer IoT products have been designed to optimise functionality and cost over security. As a result, many of them have little to no security features built-in. This poses cybersecurity risks such as the compromise of consumers' privacy and data."

More information about the Labelling scheme can be read here.

[ . . . ] "While consumers may want to choose a more secure product, information on the amount of security built into a device is often not made known by manufacturers. Thus, consumers are unable to make informed decisions."

[ . . . ] Starting off softly then tightening the rope

Both the UK and Singaporian approach start off with a soft scheme hoping that the industry itself will find and join forces with regards to best practise for the labelling.

[ . . . ] Are consumers ignorant, or can there be a differentiator here?

As a manufacturer of connected devices, there are two main approaches to embrace this tidal wave brewing.

It would be helpful if labels disclosed all of the built in vulnerabilities known at time of manufacture.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Waymo drivers say they're being discouraged from canceling robotaxi rides during coronavirus outbreak

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, says it will keep operating its fleet of roughly 600 self-driving taxis in Arizona during the novel coronavirus outbreak. But the safety drivers who monitor the autonomous taxis are concerned that they are being put in harm's way.

Waymo is "strongly encouraging" its full-time employees without "business critical" tasks to work from home. Its safety drivers, who are employed by a French transit company called Transdev North America that has a multiyear contract with Waymo, are still mostly required to come into work, The Verge has learned. Transdev appears to be following guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by stepping up the frequency of its cleanings and disinfections. But drivers tell The Verge that the Waymo vendor is ignoring recommendations about social distancing.

"It feels like the drivers are treated like second class citizens, having to report to work and serve 'hails' while the full-time employees are required to work from home to stay safe," said a Waymo driver who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. "Safety for some."

On Wednesday, a Waymo safety driver declined to pick up a rider at Intel's campus in Chandler, Arizona, after hearing news reports that an employee of the microchip giant had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Chandler is a town to the southeast of Phoenix where the bulk of Waymo's commercial ride-hailing is located.

Hours later, Transdev sent an email to all drivers mentioning the Intel incident and noting that Waymo and Transdev "are committed to responding quickly to ensure the health and safety of our employees."

Original Submission

Chocolate writes:

A UK supermarket has banned the use of money that was stored in shoes and bras as part of the effort to reign in the spread of COVID-19. Among other strange facts coming out of this outbreak is that some people lick their money before handing it over to the cashier.

We are doomed.

[Ed Note - Updated the story to reflect that the store is called Iceland and is, in fact, a UK supermarket.]

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Coronavirus could force ISPs to abandon data caps forever

The coronavirus threat and official policies of "social distancing" are leading millions to stay home, doing meetings via video chat and probably watching Netflix and YouTube the rest of the time. That means a big uptick in bytes going through the tubes, both simultaneously and cumulatively.

ISPs, leery of repeating Verizon's memorable gaffe of cutting off service during an emergency, are proposing a variety of user-friendly changes to their policies. Comcast is boosting the bandwidth of its low-income Internet Essentials customers to levels that actually qualify as broadband under FCC rules. AT&T is suspending data caps for all its customers until further notice.

[ . . . ] There are two simple truths at play here.

The first is that any company that sends its subscriber a $150 overage fee because they had to work from home for a month and ran over their data cap is going to be radioactive. The optics on that are so bad that my guess is most companies are quietly setting forgiveness policies in place to prevent it from happening — though of course it probably will anyway.

The second is that these caps are completely unnecessary, existing only as a way to squeeze more money from subscribers. Data caps just don't matter any more.

Off with their... caps?

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Court outlaws German Weather Service's free weather app

WetterOnline has won its case against Germany's national weather service. The company sued the service over the anti-competitive nature of its free weather forecast app.

The German Weather Service (DWD) will no longer be allowed to provide general weather forecasts in a free mobile phone app after a federal court ruled in favor of a private firm on Thursday.

[...] the national meteorological service will only be permitted to offer extreme weather warnings for free and that a DWD app offering general weather forecasts must contain advertisements or be purchased by users.

^<sarcasm>
No national weather service could ever make a profit by giving away weather information for free.
_</sarcasm>

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Europe Wants a 'Right to Repair' Smartphones and Gadgets

The European Union is seeking to help consumers fix or upgrade devices, rather than replace them, as part of a 30-year push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

LONDON — Hoping to replace that two-year-old smartphone in a few months? The European Union wants you to think twice about doing that.

The bloc announced an ambitious plan on Wednesday that would require manufacturers of electronic products, from smartphones to tumble driers, to offer more repairs, upgrades and ways to reuse existing goods, instead of encouraging consumers to buy new ones.

[ . . . ] "The linear growth model of 'take-make-use-discard' has reached its limits," Virginijus Sinkevicius, the union's environment commissioner, told reporters in Brussels as he presented the "Circular Economy Action Plan," which includes the "right to repair" initiative.

"We want to make sure that products placed on E.U. market are designed to last longer, to be easier to repair and upgrade, easier to recycle and easier to reuse," he added.

Hopefully this would put an end to the waste and cost associat... Look! Over there! A new Shiny!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow420:

Vermont sues Clearview, alleging "oppressive, unscrupulous" practices:

Clearview AI's bread and butter is a tool providing facial recognition on a massive scale to law enforcement, federal agencies, private companies, and—apparently—nosy billionaires. The company has achieved this reportedly by scraping more or less the entire public Internet to assemble a database of more than 3 billion images. Now that there are spotlights on the secretive firm, however, Clearview is facing a barrage of lawsuits trying to stop it in its tracks.

The latest comes from Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan, who filed suit against Clearview this week claiming violations of multiple state laws.

The complaint (PDF) alleges that Clearview, which is registered as a data broker under Vermont's Data Broker Law, "unlawfully acquires data from consumers and business concerns" in Vermont.

Clearview built its massive database by gobbling up "publicly available" data from the Internet's biggest platforms—including Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others—most of whom have since issued cease-and-desist letters telling Clearview in no uncertain terms to knock it off. These images are frequently of minors, the complaint notes, and Clearview admitted in its state filing to knowingly having images of minors collected without anyone's consent. Vermont's data law prohibits "fraudulent acquisition of brokered personal information," and the state argues that Clearview's screen-scraping tactics are exactly that.

What Clearview does with its ill-gotten data is also a problem, the state argues. The Green Mountain State's first issue is from a security perspective: the company has already suffered at least one data breach, in which its client list—which it has repeatedly refused to make public—was stolen. The second issue is privacy.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow420:

Microsoft—and Ars—advise split-tunnel VPNs to minimize coronavirus woes:

When SARS hit its peak, remote work wasn't yet practical enough for quarantine efforts to affect office networks much. With the coronavirus, though, most of the toolset needed to work from home or the road is available—but many office networks are having difficulty handling the sudden increase in scale.

There's not much you can do about a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection that isn't robust enough to handle traffic from remote workers to internal infrastructure such as file servers and application servers. But much of a typical company's infrastructure isn't onsite at all anymore—it's increasingly likely to be hosted in the cloud, behind its own set of protective firewalls and filters.

Traditionally, most office VPNs are set up to route not just office traffic, but all traffic—including Internet-destined traffic—across the user's VPN tunnel. For most sites, that means paying a double penalty—or worse—for all Internet traffic from VPN-connected users. Each HTTPS request and its subsequent response must hit both the upload and download side of the office's WAN twice. This is bad enough with a symmetric WAN—e.g., a 500Mbps fiber link—but it's beyond punishing for an asymmetric WAN, such as a 100Mbps-down/10Mbps-up coaxial link.

[...] We generally advise routing only office-bound traffic over an office VPN and allowing all Internet traffic to proceed directly to its destination—this can easily reduce VPN traffic by an order of magnitude or more, and the router-level filtering and monitoring in most offices isn't particularly useful in the first place.

Doing things this way is simple—the network administrator disables global routing in their VPN configurations and only routes the office's subnet(s) across the tunnel. The details vary by VPN implementation, but in Cisco VPN clients, for example, it's a simple checkbox to be ticked on or off.

[...] IPv6, unfortunately, gets its usual "eh, maybe later" treatment—Microsoft advises that IPv6 endpoints can simply be ignored and notes that its services "will currently operate successfully on IPv4 only, but not the other way around."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Why do small dogs live longer than big dogs?:

Professor Elgar says the answer to the puzzle of canine lifespans can be found in data that charts "the schedule" of a species' rate of ageing.

This reflects the relationship between the age of an individual and how susceptible it is to dying. So while larger species typically live longer than smaller species, within a species smaller individuals could outlive larger individuals.

And this is particularly important when it come to dogs. A millennia of domestication and breeding means that dog breeds can vary in body size by up to 50 times.

Professor Elgar says that the research comparing size and age-related mortality in dogs shows that larger dogs die younger because they age significantly faster than smaller dogs.

A large study of 74 dog breeds in North America concluded "the driving force behind the trade-off between size and lifespan is apparently a strong positive relationship between size and ageing rate.

"We conclude that large dogs die young mainly because they age quickly."

Professor Elgar says that a larger dog, because of its size, may put more strain on its physiological processes, meaning they tend to wear out more quickly.

"Modern cars generally work well for eight or nine years, and then wear and tear sets in and they start falling apart. The speed with which they deteriorate varies between manufacturers. It's the same with dogs."

Dog morbidity rate is also impacted—as it is for humans—by lifestyle.

Just as young men aged 18 to 25 are more likely to die by misadventure, a working dog like a kelpie or sheepdog is more likely to die in an accident than a schnoodle whose only occupation is to look cute in its favourite chair.

Professor Elgar says the rule of thumb is that "the average lifespan for quite large dogs is about seven years, and 14 years for smaller dogs."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Large ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest, will collapse and disappear alarmingly quickly, once a crucial tipping point is reached, according to calculations based on real-world data.

Writing in Nature Communications, researchers from Bangor University, Southampton University and The School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, reveal the speed at which ecosystems of different sizes will disappear, once they have reached a point beyond which they collapse -- transforming into an alternative ecosystem.

For example, once the 'point of no return' is reached, the iconic Amazon rainforest could shift to a savannah-type ecosystem with a mix of trees and grass within 50 years, according to the work.

Some scientists argue that many ecosystems are currently teetering on the edge of this precipice, with the fires and destruction both in the Amazon and in Australia.

"Unfortunately, what our paper reveals is that humanity needs to prepare for changes far sooner than expected," says joint lead author Dr Simon Willcock of Bangor University's School of Natural Sciences.

"These rapid changes to the world's largest and most iconic ecosystems would impact the benefits which they provide us with, including everything from food and materials, to the oxygen and water we need for life."

-- submitted from IRC

Gregory S. Cooper, Simon Willcock & John A. Dearing. Regime shifts occur disproportionately faster in larger ecosystems. Nature Communications, 2020 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15029-x

Original Submission