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quietus writes:

German company CureVac has received a rather strange offer from the current White House.

On March 3, CureVac's CEO was invited to the White House, for a meeting with President Trump, Vice Pence and several members of the Coronavirus Task Force. Asked for when a vaccine could be ready, he estimated that a potential candidate could be ready within a few months. Apparently, that triggered the members of the meeting so much, that they've now offered to buy the company, at whatever price.

One condition though: production would be exclusively for the United States.

The move is not exactly one to gain popularity, and follows on the heels of the President's worrying statement that "a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe".

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Hacking a Mileage Manipulator CAN Bus Filter Device:

I have read an article on the teardown of a dashboard mileage manipulator dongle on Hackaday. A “CAN bus filter” device was found in a vehicle, connected to the back of its instrument cluster. When it was removed and the original connections were restored, the odometer immediately showed 40 000 kilometers more than before. The author made a quick teardown and analysis on the device but because it was supposed to be locked (according to the article), the firmware was not extracted, leaving the big question unanswered: What it does and how it does it?

Mileage manipulation is illegal in many countries and one could easily go to jail if kept doing it. Still, this is quite common practice on the used car market and mileage manipulator devices could be easily purchased by anyone. The main purpose of these “greyish” tools is to mislead and to fool the buyers. Considering this, I was happy to extend my “to be hacked” list with them, and I also wanted to see how they work and if there is anything to do against the “attack”. Everything was set for a cool project combining car hacking, hardware hacking and reverse engineering. Due to the nature of the topic, I expect readers with less relevant technical knowledge as well, so I tried to provide a bit more details and explanation, to make sure everyone can follow along.

These boards can be found on eBay for $15-25, e.g. by searching for “18 in 1 Universal CAN Filter“. Several sellers are providing them under different fantasy names and with some variance in their supported vehicle list. I decided to order two type of CAN filters from two different sellers. They had the same functionalities, but their PCB looked a bit different. Both CAN filter devices support a bunch of car models from two major German OEMs (just look for the description in the eBay product pages). After one makes the mileage manipulation, this device will prevent the odometer’s sync and increase, by manipulating the relevant communication.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

New record set for cryptographic challenge:

An international team of computer scientists has set a new record for integer factorization, one of the most important computational problems underlying the security of nearly all public-key cryptography currently used today.

[...] To encourage research into integer factorization, the "RSA Factoring Challenges" were created in 1991. These challenges consisted of challenge integers of varying sizes, named for the number of integer digits.

The team of computer scientists from France and the United States set a new record by factoring the largest integer of this form to date, the RSA-250 cryptographic challenge. This integer is the product of two prime numbers, each with 125 decimal digits. In total, it took 2700 years of running powerful computer cores to carry out the computation, which was done on tens of thousands of machines around the world over the course of a few months.

The key broken with this record computation is smaller than keys that would typically be used in practice by modern cryptographic applications: it has 829 binary bits, where current practice dictates that RSA keys should be at least 2048 binary bits long. Researchers use these types of computations to choose key strength recommendations that will remain secure for the foreseeable future.

"Achieving computational records regularly is necessary to update cryptographic security parameters and key size recommendations," said Nadia Heninger, a professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego, and a member of the research team.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Ancient Language Processing: Teaching Computers to Read Cuneiform Tablets:

Twenty-five centuries ago, the "paperwork" of Persia's Achaemenid Empire was recorded on clay tablets—tens of thousands of which were discovered in 1933 in modern-day Iran by archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute [(OI)]. For decades, researchers painstakingly studied and translated these ancient documents by hand, but this manual deciphering process is very difficult, slow and prone to errors.

[...]Since the 1990s, scientists have recruited computers to help—with limited success, due to the three-dimensional nature of the tablets and the complexity of the cuneiform characters. But a technological breakthrough at the University of Chicago may finally make automated transcription of these tablets—which reveal rich information about Achaemenid history, society and language—possible, freeing up archaeologists for higher-level analysis.

That's the motivation behind DeepScribe, a collaboration between researchers from the OI and UChicago's Department of Computer Science. With a training set of more than 6,000 annotated images from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, (directed by professor emeritus Matthew W. Stolper), the project will build a model that can "read" as-yet-unanalyzed tablets in the collection, and potentially [create] a tool that archaeologists can adapt to other studies of ancient writing.

"If we could come up with a tool that is flexible and extensible, that can spread to different scripts and time periods, that would really be field-changing," said Susanne Paulus, associate professor of Assyriology.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Update 1: 20200315_130751 UTC: Updated to add alternate YouTube links. --martyb]

[Update 2: 20200315_133158 UTC: Today's launch was aborted at T:+0:00, due to "Launch abort on engine high power". No word, yet, on when a retry will be attempted.--martyb]

[Update 3: 20200315_195221 UTC: SpaceX tweet: "Standing down today; standard auto-abort triggered due to out of family data during engine power check. Will announce next launch date opportunity once confirmed on the Range". In response to a query "Out of family?", User Viv replied: "Data from sensors & system isn’t always the same, but if you plot it on a graph, all nominal data will be one big cluster aka family. If readings from sensors or systems are not within this cluster, they’re out of family, eg something might be wrong w sensors or system itself". For those who missed it, here is a brief video that shows a few seconds bracketing the scheduled launch countdown and abort. Follow the main SpaceX twitter feed for date and time of next launch attempt. --martyb]

Watch Live: SpaceX attempts to launch the same Falcon 9 a fifth time:

In launching its next batch of Starlink satellites—the company's sixth batch of 60 operational spacecraft—SpaceX plans to continue to push the bounds of reuse. With this mission, for the first time, the company plans to fly the same Falcon 9 first stage for the fifth time.

After completing a static fire test of its Falcon 9 rocket's first stage on Friday, the company is now targeting Sunday at 9:22am ET (13:22 UTC) for the mission from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The weather is expected to be favorable, with only a 10 percent chance of poor conditions due to too many cumulus clouds.

SpaceX also announced on Friday that it will reuse the rocket's payload fairing, which previously flew on a Starlink mission in May 2019. This means that the only part of the Falcon 9 rocket not being recycled is its second stage, which is powered by a single Merlin vacuum engine and pushes the satellites from the edge of space to their deployment into an orbit more than 200km above the ground.

[...] For Sunday's launch attempt, SpaceX will attempt to recover this first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. It will also attempt to retrieve the fairing halves. This will be the sixth launch of the year for SpaceX.

According to SpaceFlighNow's launch schedule:

Launch time: 1322 GMT (9:22 a.m. EDT)
Launch site: LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to launch the sixth batch of approximately 60 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, a mission designated Starlink 5.

The launch will be live-streamed on YouTube; the feed usually starts about 20 minutes before launch time.

Alternate live stream links #1 and #2.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Ice Lake GPU underperforming? Put it in powersave mode. Wait, what?:

Back in December, Linux users were starting to notice that Ice Lake-equipped laptops were getting better framerates in powersave mode than in performance mode. This Tuesday, Intel developer Francisco Jerez released a patchset to address the conundrum. Jerez begins by noting the fact that if your system bottleneck is I/O, boosting CPU performance won't help—the CPU can't process more data if the I/O subsystem isn't providing it fast enough.

"In IO-bound scenarios (by definition) the throughput of the system doesn't improve with increasing CPU frequency beyond the threshold value at which the IO device becomes the bottleneck."

Jerez goes on to note that pointlessly boosting the CPU into turbo frequencies when there's no additional data for it to process doesn't just hurt power efficiency. In the case of laptop designs, there's typically no room for desktop- or server-style "overengineering"—you've got limited space as well as limited power. This means, among other things, that there's only so much cooling to go around.

"With the current governors [...] the CPU frequency tends to oscillate with the load, often with an amplitude far into the turbo range, leading to severely reduced energy efficiency."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Undercompressive shocks proposed to explain 'tears of wine' phenomenon:

A small team of researchers at the University of California has developed a theory to explain the shape of tears of wine. They have written a paper describing their theory and uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server—it has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Tears of wine, in which some of the wine in a glass is pulled up the sides and then drains back down into the remaining wine, are a common occurrence. The resulting patterns that encircle the glass bear a resemblance to human tears. Scientists have been pondering the effect for over a century, and their research has partially explained the process, but there was one remaining mystery—why did the liquid form tear -shaped patterns? In this new effort, the researchers have proposed what they believe is the answer.

Theory for undercompressive shocks in tears of wine, Physical Review Fluids (2020) journals.aps.org/prfluids/acce ... c39536c10099b7209059 , On Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/1909.09898

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Astrophysicists wear 3-D glasses to watch quasars:

A team of researchers from Russia and Greece reports a way to determine the origins and nature of quasar light by its polarization. The new approach is analogous to the way cinema glasses produce a 3-D image by feeding each eye with the light of a particular polarization, either horizontal or vertical. The authors of the recent study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society managed to distinguish between the light coming from different parts of quasars—their disks and jets—by discerning its distinct polarizations.

Active galactic nuclei, also known as quasars, are massive black holes with matter orbiting them. They emit two oppositely directed jets of plasma traveling out into space at close to the speed of light.

Any massive black hole has matter orbiting it, slowly falling toward it and emitting light. This matter forms what is known as an accretion disk. Due to a mechanism that is not yet fully understood, part of the matter approaching the black hole makes an escape. It is accelerated to tremendous velocities and expelled along the black hole's axis of rotation in the form of two symmetric jets of hot plasma. When a quasar is observed, the radiation picked up by a telescope comes from the jets, the accretion disk, and also from the stars, dust and gas in the host galaxy.

[...] Yuri Kovalev, who heads the MIPT Laboratory of Fundamental and Applied Research of Relativistic Objects of the Universe, said, "The fact that jet radiation was polarized was known. We combined the data obtained by radio and optical telescopes, and showed that the polarization is directed along the jet. The conclusion from this is that hot plasma must be moving in a magnetic field that is coiled like a spring."

But there's more to it. "It turned out that by measuring the polarization of the light picked up by the telescope, we can tell which part of radiation came from the jet and determine its direction," co-author Alexander Plavin said. "This is analogous to how 3-D glasses enable each eye to see a different picture. There is no other way to obtain such information about the disk and jet with an optical telescope."

The findings are important for modeling black hole behavior, studying accretion disks, and understanding the mechanism that accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light in active galactic nuclei.

More information: Y Y Kovalev et al. Optical polarization properties of AGNs with significant VLBI–Gaia offsets, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slaa008

Journal information: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to all Windows 10 users (archive):

You won't have to be a tester to try Windows 10's new, built-in Linux kernel in the near future. Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 will be widely available when Windows 10 version 2004 arrives. You'll have to install it manually for a "few months" until an update adds automatic installs and updates, but that's a small price to pay if you want Linux and Windows to coexist in peace and harmony. It'll be easier to set up, at least -- the kernel will now be delivered through Windows Update instead of forcing you to install an entire Windows image.

Embrace, Extend... Excite!

Windows blog post.

Previously: Windows 10 Will Soon Ship with a Full, Open Source, GPLed Linux Kernel

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow420:

Student privacy laws still apply if coronavirus just closed your school:

Hundreds of colleges and universities are suddenly shutting their doors and making a rapid switch to distance learning in an effort to slow the spread of novel coronavirus disease. Likewise, hundreds of K-12 districts nationwide have either already followed suit or are likely to in the coming days.

[...] Even when all of the immediate logistical and technical needs have been triaged and handled, though, there remains another complicating factor. While the United States doesn't have all that much in the way of privacy legislation, we do, in fact, have a law protecting some student educational data. It's called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

FERPA applies to both written and digital student records. For students under age 18, the provisions about what may (or must) be shared or not shared apply to their parents or guardians. Once a student turns 18, the protections transfer to them directly. The provisions also apply directly to any student enrolled in a college, even if that student is not yet 18 (such as in community college dual-enrollment programs for high school juniors and seniors).

The act prohibits "improper disclosure" to third parties of personally identifiable information (PII) derived from student records. Schools are not prohibited from allowing vendors access to information for the purpose of providing services—you can use third-party digital tools for administrative and educational purposes without being in violation of the law. But the school may then be held responsible if the vendors then do shady things with student data.

[...] Software platforms allowing videoconferencing, recording, and screen sharing have all seen a massive spike in use in recent weeks. Microsoft, Google, Slack, and Zoom are all offering discounts or extra features to businesses, groups, and individuals to help with the everything from home era in which we (hopefully temporarily) find ourselves. Not all of those tools, many of which are designed for enterprise use, are necessarily going to be compliant with educational regulations.

[...] In 2013, a group of students sued Google over its "creepy" data-mining from Google Apps for Education tools. Google ended the practice in 2014, only to be sued again in 2016 by a group of current and former university students alleging their data was collected and retained from their Google academic accounts in violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Original Submission

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