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takyon writes:

New document reveals significant fall from grace for Boeing's space program

[A] new document released by NASA reveals the broader scope of Boeing's apparent decline in spaceflight dominance. The "source selection statement" from NASA explains the space agency's rationale for selecting SpaceX over three other companies—Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Sierra Nevada Corporation—to deliver large supplies of cargo to lunar orbit. NASA announced its selection of SpaceX for this "Gateway Logistics" contract in late March. The selection document says that SpaceX provided the best technical approach and the lowest price by a "significant" margin.

This lunar cargo contract is essentially the third in a series of three "commercial" contracts NASA has offered to buy services at a fixed price over the last dozen years. First came cargo delivery to low-Earth orbit. Final selections for that program were SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, a company now owned by Northrop Grumman, in 2008. Second came crew delivery to low-Earth orbit in 2014. The final selections were SpaceX and Boeing, with its now-troubled Starliner spacecraft.

When comparing the selection rationale for the 2014 commercial crew contracts with the rationale for the recent Gateway logistics contract, the perception of Boeing's offering could not be more stark. In 2014, Boeing was very much perceived as the gold-standard—expensive, yes, but also technically masterful. In 2020, the company was still perceived as expensive but not ultimately worthy of consideration.

[...] Six years later, the perception of Boeing's bid for the lunar cargo contract is much changed. Of the four contenders, it had the lowest overall technical and mission suitability scores. In addition, Boeing's proposal was characterized as "inaccurate" and possessing no "significant strengths." Boeing also was cited with a "significant weakness" in its proposal for pushing back on providing its software source code.

Due to its high price and ill-suited proposal for the lunar cargo contract, NASA didn't even consider the proposal among the final bidders. In his assessment late last year, NASA's acting chief of human spaceflight, Ken Bowersox, wrote, "Since Boeing's proposal was the highest priced and the lowest rated under the Mission Suitability factor, while additionally providing a conditional fixed price, I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration."

Previously: NASA Picks SpaceX for Lunar Missions

Related: Boeing to Launch Starliner Spacecraft for Second Go at Reaching the ISS after First Mission Failed

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"upstart" writes:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Bacteria in rock deep under sea inspire new search for life on Mars

Newly discovered single-celled creatures living deep beneath the seafloor have given researchers clues about how they might find life on Mars. These bacteria were discovered living in tiny cracks inside volcanic rocks after researchers persisted over a decade of trial and error to find a new way to examine the rocks.

Researchers estimate that the rock cracks are home to a community of bacteria as dense as that of the human gut, about 10 billion bacterial cells per cubic centimeter (0.06 cubic inch). In contrast, the average density of bacteria living in mud sediment on the seafloor is estimated to be 100 cells per cubic centimeter.

"I am now almost over-expecting that I can find life on Mars. If not, it must be that life relies on some other process that Mars does not have, like plate tectonics," said Associate Professor Yohey Suzuki from the University of Tokyo, referring to the movement of land masses around Earth most notable for causing earthquakes. Suzuki is first author of the research paper announcing the discovery, published in Communications Biology.

Also at CNET.

Deep microbial proliferation at the basalt interface in 33.5–104 million-year-old oceanic crust (open, DOI: 10.1038/s42003-020-0860-1) (DX)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

University libraries offer online "lending" of scanned in-copyright books:

The coronavirus crisis has forced the closure of libraries around the world, depriving the public of access to millions of printed books. Books old enough to be in the public domain may be available for free download online. Many recent books are available to borrow in e-book form. But there are many other books—especially those published in the mid-to-late 20th century—that are hard to access without going to a physical library.

A consortium of university libraries called HathiTrust recently announced a solution to this problem, called the Emergency Temporary Access Service. It allows participating HathiTrust member libraries to offer their patrons digital scans of books that they can "check out" and read online.

HathiTrust has a history of pushing the boundaries of copyright. It was the defendant in a landmark 2014 ruling that established the legality of library book scanning. At the time, HathiTrust was only allowing people with print disabilities to access the full text of scanned books. Now HathiTrust is expanding access to more people—though still with significant limits.

The program is only available to patrons of member libraries like the Cornell library. Libraries can only "lend" as many copies of the book as it has physical copies on its shelves. Loans last for an hour and are automatically renewed if a patron is still viewing a book at the hour's end. If you want to read a book that's currently in use by another patron, you have to wait until they're finished.

These limits distinguish HathiTrust's service from another recently announced "emergency library." Two weeks ago, the Internet Archive announced it was offering the general public the opportunity to check out 1.4 million scanned books. During the pandemic, the Internet Archive isn't limiting the number of people who can "borrow" a book simultaneously.

Previously: Internet Archive Suspends E-Book Lending "Waiting Lists" During U.S. National Emergency
Authors Fume as Online Library "Lends" Unlimited Free Books

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PiMuNu writes:

Isotropy of the universe is the idea that the universe is the same in all directions, and is a founding principle of the laws of physics. However, that principle has been called into question by observations of galaxy cluster temperatures and luminosities.

https://scitechdaily.com/fundamental-principle-of-cosmology-cast-in-doubt-by-compelling-new-study/

"No matter where we look, the same rules apply everywhere in space: countless calculations of astrophysics are based on this basic principle. A recent study by the Universities of Bonn and Harvard, however, has thrown this principle into question. Should the measured values be confirmed, this would toss many assumptions about the properties of the universe overboard. The results are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, but are already available online."

The paper (open access):
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2020/04/aa36602-19/aa36602-19.html

Journal Reference (open access):
K. Migkas, G. Schellenberger, T. H. Reiprich, F. Pacaud, M. E. Ramos-Ceja and L. Lovisari. Probing cosmic isotropy with a new X-ray galaxy cluster sample through the L X – T scaling relation , 8 April 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201936602

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Scientists find another hole in the ozone layer, and this one's over the Arctic- Technology News, Firstpost:

Scientists have observed the opening up of a rare hole in the ozone layer above the Arctic. They attribute it to the unusually low temperatures in the atmosphere above the North Pole.

Scientists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) found out about this ozone depletion using data from the Copernicus Sentinel–5P satellite.

The Copernicus programme is a collaboration between the European Space Agency, the European Commission, and other stakeholders.

"The ozone hole we observed over the Arctic this year has a maximum extension of less than 1 million sq. km. This is small compared to the Antarctic hole, which can reach a size of around 20 to 25 million sq. km with a normal duration of around three to four months," said Diego Loyola of the German Aerospace Center.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service(CAMS) says that the last time a similar depletion of the ozone layer was observed over the Arctic was in spring 2011.
CAMS reveals that the depletion in 2020 seems to be stronger than the previous one.

The reports assert that while the development of ozone holes over the Antarctic every year during the Austral spring is a common phenomenon, such strong ozone depletion is not normally found in the Northern Hemisphere.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

TV advertising's watershed moment: It is finally becoming more like digital - Digiday:

Typically, TV networks have sold three-quarters of their national advertising inventory for a given month before that month begins. However [in the USA], as of late March, only roughly one-quarter of that inventory had been booked for April, according to a TV advertising industry executive familiar with the matter. Then less than a week into April, more than half of the national TV ad inventory for the month had been booked, said this executive who took the shift as a sign that advertisers are prioritizing flexibility when spending their money at the moment.

[...] TV advertising's supply-demand dynamic began to shift in March as advertisers with businesses more directly impacted by the pandemic, such as travel-related companies, pulled their ad dollars from the market. In April, it has shifted up a gear. "For the most part, the bigger clients started to cut in April, and I think April will be the biggest [inventory] holes for the networks. In some cases, clients shifted back [to run campaigns later in the year]; in some cases, they cut in totality," said the second agency executive.

TV networks have scrambled to deal with the current supply-demand dynamic. They are working with advertisers to redirect ads meant to air during live sports. They have filled programming holes left by the live sports hiatus with re-airings of classic games and live specials. They are having their internal creative services teams work with advertisers to create new ads for advertisers that are better suited to the current cultural context. And in the case of NBCUniversal, they are reducing the volume of ads on their networks, though an NBCU spokesperson declined to provide figures for that reduction.

"All of my members are basically in 24/7 rework," said Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of industry organization Video Advertising Bureau, whose members include major TV network conglomerates, such as Disney, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS.

[...] Agency executives also see a potential long-term benefit to buying ads in April. "If clients are staying on air during March and April, that gives us a better opportunity to go back later and say, 'Look, we partnered with you during the tough time. How about helping us out in the last part of the year?" said a fourth agency executive. This person said that clients will look for either programming upgrades or lower CPMs "just to make it fair that we continued to be partners during the tough time."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Bugs that let sites hijack Mac and iPhone cameras fetch $75k bounty:

A security bug that gave malicious hackers the ability to access the cameras of Macs, iPhones, and iPads has fetched a $75,000 bounty to the researcher who discovered it.

In posts published here and here, researcher Ryan Pickren said he discovered seven vulnerabilities in Safari and its Webkit browser engine that, when chained together, allowed malicious websites to turn on the cameras of Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Pickren privately reported the bugs, and Apple has since fixed the vulnerabilities and paid the researcher $75,000 as part of the company's bug bounty program.

Apple tightly restricts the access that third-party apps get to device cameras. For Apple apps, the restrictions aren't quite as stringent. Even then, Safari requires users to explicitly list the sites that are allowed camera access. And beyond that, cameras can only have access to those sites when they are delivered in a secure context, meaning when the browser has high confidence the page is being delivered through an HTTPS connection.

Pickren devised an exploit chain that bypassed these protections. By exploiting multiple vulnerabilities he discovered, the researcher was able to force Safari to treat his malicious proof-of-concept website as if it was Skype.com, which for demonstration purposes was included in the list of trusted sites. (Skype.com doesn't actually support Safari, but Pickren's exploit can spoof any site, including Zoom and Google Hangouts, that does.) The video below shows the result.

[...] The longer of Pickren's two posts, located here, provides a deep dive into the technical details. In an email, Pickren summarized the exploit this way:

My malicious website used a "data URL" to generate a "blob URL" and then used the Location.replace() web API to navigate to it. This tricked Safari into accidentally giving me a malformed "origin" (CVE-2020-3864). With this malformed origin, I used the window.history API to change my URL to "blob://skype.com." From there, I effectively nulled-out my origin to trick Safari into thinking I was in a "secure context" (CVE-2020-3865). Because Safari previously ignored the URL schemes when applying website permissions (CVE-2020-3852), I was able to leverage all of the permissions that the victim granted to the real skype.com.

While the attack chain exploited the vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2020-3864, CVE-2020-3865, and CVE-2020-3852, Pickren discovered four other flaws that are indexed as CVE-2020-3885, CVE-2020-3887, CVE-2020-9784, & CVE-2020-9787. Apple fixed most of them in late January (see advisories here and here) and patched the remainder last month.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy):

Cloudflare on Wednesday said it is ditching Google's reCAPTCHA bot detector for a similar service called hCaptcha out of concerns about privacy and availability, but mostly cost.

The network services biz said it initially adopted reCAPTCHA because it was free, effective, and worked at scale. Some Cloudflare customers, however, have expressed reservations about having data sent to Google.

Google's reCAPTCHA v3, used on about 1.2m websites, provides a way for web publishers to present puzzles called CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) that can usually, but not always, distinguish automated website interaction from human engagement. The point of presenting such challenges is to keep bots from registering fake accounts and conducting other sorts of online abuse.

In a blog post, CEO Matthew Prince and product manager Sergi Isasi observed that while Google is an advertising business and Cloudflare is not, Cloudflare nonetheless reconciled itself to Google's privacy policy even if it made some customers wary.

The biz also has also been concerned about the availability of reCAPTCHA in China, given that Google services are intermittently blocked there. China is home to about a quarter of the world's internet users so a significant number of people could be unable to access websites barricaded behind inaccessible reCATPCHA puzzles.

Prince and Isasi note that Cloudflare has had some issues with this in China and elsewhere. But over the past decade, this hasn't been enough to warrant action.

Finally, earlier this year, Google told Cloudflare it plans to begin charging for reCAPTCHA, a service it has previously offered for free because the answers people provide improve its services and machine learning systems.

In an email to The Register, a Google spokesperson said there's no charge for reCAPTCHA unless you exceed one million queries per month or 1,000 API calls per second.

Faced with the prospect of paying millions for a service it offered at no charge to customers, Cloudflare decided something had to be done.

"That was finally enough of an impetus for us to look for a better alternative," said Prince and Isasi.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

The real reason we're seeing more wildlife during the pandemic:

As the world has slowed down to stave off the spread of COVID-19, stories of wild animals tromping into now-quiet city streets have gone viral online. Some of these turned out to be completely made-up, including the dolphins supposedly swimming through Venice canals or the elephants getting drunk on corn wine in a Chinese farming village. But there are also plenty of very real sightings of animals you might not expect in the urban jungle.

[...] Joanna Lambert, a wildlife biologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, has been seeing more wildlife lately in Lyons, Colorado, where she lives. She watched a mountain lion pad through her townhome complex and spotted a gray fox—an uncommon species to find in nature, let alone in the streets—on a daytime walk with her dogs. "They are paying attention, and certainly things have quieted down," she says of wild mammals living near cities. "One of the hallmarks of species that live near or within human settlements is that they are very behaviorally flexible and responsive to these kinds of changes."

[...] As cities quiet down and empty out, many animals may quickly take note. Lambert says she wouldn't expect the changes to be dramatic. Wild animals still rely on open spaces for food and shelter, and thus we won't be seeing coyotes moving their dens downtown any time soon. But it's possible they might be venturing farther or switching up their schedules. "The medium-size predators are opportunistic by nature," says Shilling. "They are responding in real time to the disturbance. They have territories and the edges are flexible based on what's making them go away."

[...] However, in the case of the larger animals, some officials think the change is mainly due to our own perception. Now, with many at home and bored, we're perhaps increasingly staring out the window and going on walks in our neighborhood. A press release by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department says that the increased sightings are more likely just due to being at home. "With more people at home looking or being outside, wildlife sightings could go up," reads the statement. "This won't be a new phenomenon, the animals have always been there, but they may have previously gone undetected."

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/china-suffers-its-second-launch-failure-in-less-than-a-month/

The Long March 3B rocket is one of China's oldest active and most reliable boosters, with more than five dozen successful launches. On Thursday, however, the rocket failed when it attempted to launch an Indonesian telecommunications satellite, Nusantara Dua, from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

Although ground-based observations showed the first and second stages of the rocket performing nominally, apparently something went wrong with the final stage needed for a boost into geostationary transfer orbit. Chinese media reports indicate that the third stage failed due to unspecified reasons and that the 5.5-ton satellite fell back into Earth's atmosphere.

From a comment on the arstechnica article:
https://twitter.com/sybil_ms/status/1248253670476546048 (Picture of a fireball falling from the sky.)

Residents on Guam and Saipan heard a loud explosion and then debris falling from the sky. Homeland Security said it's the March 3B. Here is some video of what was seen pic.twitter.com/JqwWIK5Uxk
        — Ms Sybil Ludington (@sybil_ms) April 9, 2020

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

China-backed hacking groups targeting Linux servers for nearly 10 years!:

BlackBerry's extensive report titled Decade of the RATs: Cross-Platform APT¹ Espionage Attacks Targeting Linux, Windows and Android have exposed how hacking groups coordinating in the interest of Chinese governments have been stealing data of numerous servers and client devices for nearly a decade.

[...] The report once again raises questions on potentially lackluster data privacy and security measures being implemented by major technology companies around the world and shows the need for robust standards to significantly step up the privacy and security game.

[...] The Work-From-Home situation, in particular, has forced companies to reduce the number of personnel onsite to maintain security in these challenging times. While employees are not working from offices, the intellectual property still remains in data centers.

Well, nearly 75 percent of web servers, 98 percent of worldwide supercomputers and 75 percent of major cloud service providers run on Linux. In fact, it also powers the top 1 million websites on the Internet. So of course, there's so much on stake here.

Commenting on this report, Eric Cornelius, Chief Product Architect at BlackBerry, had this to say:

"Linux is not typically user-facing, and most security companies focus their engineering and marketing attention on products designed for the front office instead of the server rack, so coverage for Linux is sparse."

BlackBerry has released a pdf of the report: Decade of the RATs: Cross-Platform APT Espionage Attacks Targeting Linux, Windows and Android report.

[1] APT: Advanced persistent threat.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides To Abuse Trademarks To Shut Down Pirates:

Kerry Culpepper, Hawaiian IP attorney, [decided] to register a bunch of trademarks for piracy related terms and [is] then going around and shutting down accounts for "pirate" services on social media sites.

[...] The idea I suppose is to try to claim that 42 Ventures is suddenly and recently using these marks in commerce, the only way it would have a valid trademark. That, however, is bullshit. The terms and actual content creators were already long using those marks, as were the holders of the social media accounts 42 Ventures is busy taking down. In other words, Culpepper appears to be perfectly willing to abuse trademark law in his efforts to enforce copyright law. That isn't exactly a consistent respect for intellectual property now, is it?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Microsoft Brings Linux Files to Windows 10 with New Update:

Windows 10 build 19603, which is now available for download in the Fast ring, includes File Explorer integration in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL.

In other words, if you have already installed WSL on your device, a new Linux drive will show up in File Explorer, letting you browse files normally.

Support for accessing Linux files that you work with in WSL isn't new in Windows 10, as such capabilities have previously been enabled in an older release. In fact, even production devices can do this starting with Windows 10 version 1903, which was released in the spring of 2019.

[...] "We've had the ability to access your Linux files since Windows 1903, but now you can easily get to them from your left-hand navigation pane in File Explorer. Selecting the Linux icon will show you a view of all your distros, and selecting those will place you in the Linux root file system for that distro," Microsoft explains.

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takyon writes:

Rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium Unveils 800 Gigabit Ethernet

With an increasing demand for networking speed and throughput performance within the datacenter and high performance computing clusters, the newly rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium has announced a new 800 Gigabit Ethernet technology. Based upon many of the existing technologies that power contemporary 400 Gigabit Ethernet, the 800GBASE-R standard is looking to double performance once again, to feed ever-hungrier datacenters.

The recently-finalized standard comes from the Ethernet Technology Consortium, the non-IEEE, tech industry-backed consortium formerly known as the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium. The group was originally created to develop 25, 50, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, and while IEEE Ethernet standards have since surpassed what the consortium achieved, the consortium has stayed formed to push even faster networking speeds, and changing its name to keep with the times. Some of the biggest contributors and supporters of the ETC include Broadcom, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft, with more than 40 companies listed as integrators of its work.

[...] All told, the 800GbE standard is the latest step for an industry as a whole that is moving to Terabit (and beyond) Ethernet. And while those future standards will ultimately require faster [Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes)] to drive the required individual lane speeds, for now 800GBASE-R can deliver 800GbE on current generation hardware. All of which should be a boon for the standard's intended hyperscaler and HPC operator customers, who are eager to get more bandwidth between systems.

Related: As 100 Gbps Ethernet Picks Up, Google Ponders 5 Petabits Per Second
Ethernet Switch Sales Flat, But 40 Gbps Sales Take Off
Here Comes 5Gbps Networking Over Standard Cables
Aquantia Launches 2.5/5/10G Ethernet Chips for Consumers
25G/50G Ethernet Specification Finalized

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

NASA Reveals Wild Project For Turning a Moon Crater Into a Radio Telescope

NASA just gave out a new round of grants for its favourite up and coming innovative space projects – one of which is a plan to fit a 1 kilometre (3,281 foot) radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon.

The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) would be able to measure wavelengths and frequencies that can't be detected from Earth, working unobstructed by the ionosphere or the various other bits of radio noise surrounding our planet.

Should the plans for the LCRT become a reality – and the new grant money could get it closer to that – it would be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System.

Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) on the Far-Side of the Moon

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission