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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

ICANN delays .org sale again after scathing letter from California AG:

ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the Internet's domain name system, has given itself another two weeks to decide whether to allow control of the .org domain to be sold to private equity firm Ethos Capital. The decision comes after ICANN received a blizzard of letters from people opposed to the transaction, including California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Becerra's letter was significant because ICANN is incorporated in California. That means it's Becerra's job to make sure that ICANN is living up to the commitments in its articles of incorporation, which promise that ICANN will operate "for the benefit of the Internet community as a whole."

Becerra questioned whether ICANN was really doing that. "There is mounting concern that ICANN is no longer responsive to the needs of its stakeholders," he wrote.

California's attorney general pointed to several specific concerns about the transaction. One was the shadowy nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital. "Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries," Becerra writes. Ethos Capital, he said, has "refused to produce responses to many critical questions posted by the public and Internet community."

Ethos Capital's plan is to buy the Public Interest Registry (PIR) from its current parent organization, the nonprofit Internet Society. To help finance the sale, Ethos will saddle PIR with $300 million in debt—a common tactic in the world of leveraged buyouts. Becerra warns that this tactic could endanger the financial viability of the PIR—especially in light of the economic uncertainty created by the coronavirus.

"If the sale goes through and PIR's business model fails to meet expectations, it may have to make significant cuts in operations," Becerra warns. "Such cuts would undoubtedly affect the stability of the .org registry."

Becerra also blasts the Internet Society for considering the sale in the first place. "ISOC purports to support the Internet, yet its actions, from the secretive nature of the transaction, to actively seeking to transfer the .org registry to an unknown entity, are contrary to its mission and potentially disruptive to the same system it claims to champion and support," he writes.

Becerra ends his letter with a warning: "This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Apple Music on the web is no longer in beta -- including on Linux:

Yes, starting today, you can simply visit https://music.apple.com/ rather than https://beta.music.apple.com/. All mentions of the word "beta" are gone, signaling it is no longer in a testing phase. This isn't just on Linux, but Windows and Mac too. Since many users of those operating systems despise iTunes, it is big news for them too -- Apple Music without the bloated iTunes!

Truth be told, I found Apple Music  to be flawless while in beta when using Firefox on Ubuntu, but it is good to know that Apple is taking the web version seriously and won't be abandoning it any time soon. Quite frankly, it is refreshing that the company hasn't tried to block Linux users by detecting the user agent.

See also: The Web-based version of Apple Music has officially launched

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Some shirts hide you from cameras:

Right now, you're more than likely spending the vast majority of your time at home. Someday, however, we will all be able to leave the house once again and emerge, blinking, into society to work, travel, eat, play, and congregate in all of humanity's many bustling crowds.

The world, when we eventually enter it again, is waiting for us with millions of digital eyes—cameras, everywhere, owned by governments and private entities alike. Pretty much every state out there has some entity collecting license plate data from millions of cars—parked or on the road—every day. Meanwhile all kinds of cameras—from police to airlines, retailers, and your neighbors' doorbells—are watching you every time you step outside, and unscrupulous parties are offering facial recognition services with any footage they get their hands on.

In short, it's not great out there if you're a person who cares about privacy, and it's likely to keep getting worse. In the long run, pressure on state and federal regulators to enact and enforce laws that can limit the collection and use of such data is likely to be the most efficient way to effect change. But in the shorter term, individuals have a conundrum before them: can you go out and exist in the world without being seen?

[Ed Note - This is a two-page article.]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For most of human history, the way to get custom shapes and colors onto one's retinas was to draw it on a cave wall, or a piece of parchment, or on paper. Later on, we invented electronic displays and used them for everything from televisions to computers, even toying with displays that gave the illusion of a 3D shape existing in front of us. Yet what if one could just skip this surface and draw directly onto our retinas?

Admittedly, the thought of aiming lasers directly at the layer of cells at the back of our eyeballs — the delicate organs which allow us to see — likely does not give one the same response as you'd have when thinking of sitting in front of a 4K, 27″ gaming display to look at the same content. Yet effectively we'd have the same photons painting the same image on our retinas. And what if it could be an 8K display, cinema-sized. Or maybe have a HUD overlay instead, like in video games?

In many ways, this concept of virtual retinal displays as they are called is almost too much like science-fiction, and yet it's been the subject of decades of research, with increasingly more sophisticated technologies making it closer to an every day reality. Will we be ditching our displays and TVs for this technology any time soon?

[...] Naturally, the very first question that may come to one's mind when hearing about VDRs is why it's suddenly okay to shine not one but three lasers into your eyes? After all, we have been told to never, not even once, point even the equivalent of a low-powered laser pointer at a person, let alone straight at their eyes. Some may remember the 2014 incident at the Burning Man festival where festival goers practically destroyed the sight of a staff member with handheld lasers.

The answer to these concerns is that very low-powered lasers are used. Enough to draw the images, not enough to do more than cause the usual wear and tear from using one's eyes to perceive the world around us. As the light is projected straight onto the retina, there is no image that can become washed out in bright sunlight. Companies like Bosch have prototypes of VRD glasses, with the latter recently showing off their BML500P Bosch Smartglasses Light Drive solution. They claim an optical output power of <15 µW.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

In a first, NASA measures wind speed on a brown dwarf:

For the first time, scientists have directly measured wind speed on a brown dwarf, an object larger than Jupiter (the largest planet in our solar system) but not quite massive enough to become a star. To achieve the finding, they used a new method that could also be applied to learn about the atmospheres of gas-dominated planets outside our solar system.

Described in a paper in the journal Science, the work combines observations by a group of radio telescopes with data from NASA's recently retired infrared observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, managed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1:

Study: 'Oumuamua interstellar object might be remnant of a "super-Earth":

In late 2017, our Solar System received its very first interstellar visitor: a bizarre cigar-shaped object hurtling past at 44 kilometers per second. Scientists have been puzzling over its origin and unusual characteristics ever since. A new paper in Nature Astronomy offers a new comprehensive model to explain some of the object's oddities. 'Oumuamua, as it is called, may be the fragment of another, larger parent body—a long-period comet or debris disk, perhaps, or even a super-Earth planet—torn apart by tidal forces as it passed too close to its host star.

"Our objective is to come up with a comprehensive scenario, based on well understood physical principles, to piece together all the tantalizing clues," said co-author Douglas Lin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We showed that 'Oumuamua-like interstellar objects can be produced through extensive tidal fragmentation during close encounters of their parent bodies with their host stars, and then ejected into interstellar space."

The interstellar object was first discovered by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 telescope, part of NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations program to track asteroids and comets that come into Earth's vicinity. The team dubbed it 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first"). Other telescopes around the world soon kicked into action, measuring the object's various characteristics, which turned out to be very odd, indeed. For starters, it was accelerating away from our Sun much faster than could be explained by gravity alone.

[...] And that brings us to this latest paper, detailing a comprehensive theory for 'Oumuamua's formation that accounts for all of its strange characteristics. Lin and his co-author, Yun Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Science's National Astronomical Observatories, ran several numerical simulations for the kinds of destructive events most likely to lead to unusually elongated fragments like 'Oumuamua. Tidal disruption—the large forces created when a small body passes very close to a much larger one, like a star—proved to be the best match.

Related
Interstellar object 'Oumuamua believed to be 'active asteroid'

Journal Reference
Yun Zhang, Douglas N. C. Lin. Tidal fragmentation as the origin of 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua), Nature Astronomy (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41550-020-1065-8)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Archaeological evidence shows that the first brown hares and chickens to arrive in Britain were buried with care and intact. There is no signs of butchery on bones examined and the ongoing research suggests the two animals were not imported for people to eat.

Work by experts from the Universities of Exeter, Leicester and Oxford is revealing when brown hares, rabbits and chickens were introduced to Britain, and how they became incorporated into modern Easter traditions.

The team has previously analyzed the earliest rabbit bone to be found in the country, which dates to the first/second century AD. New radiocarbon dates for bones found on sites in Hampshire (Houghton Down, Weston Down, Winnal Down and Winklebury Camp) and Hertfordshire (Blackhorse Road) suggests brown hares and chickens were introduced to Britain even earlier, arriving simultaneously in the Iron Age, between the fifth and the third century BC.

The discovery of buried skeletons fits historical evidence that neither animal was eaten until the Roman period, which began hundreds of years later.

Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico says: "The Britons consider it contrary to divine law to eat the hare, the chicken, or the goose. They raise these, however, for their own amusement and pleasure." The third-century AD author, Dio Cassius reported that Queen Boudicca released a live hare in order to divine the outcome of her battle with the Romans, calling upon the goddess Andraste to secure their victory.

During the Roman period, both species were farmed and eaten, and rabbits were also introduced. But in AD 410 the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain causing economic collapse. Rabbits became locally extinct, while populations of chickens and brown hares crashed. Due to their scarcity at this time, chickens and hares regained their special status.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Smart toilet gadget recognises users by their 'anal print' and analyses deposits to detect early warning signs of cancer, heart disease and diabetes

A smart-toilet that can detect signs of various diseases in faeces and urine has been built by scientists.

The gadget fits inside a regular porcelain toilet bowl and uses cameras, test strips and sensors to identify warning signs of up to ten diseases including cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

The technology uses a combination of fingerprint scanning on the flush lever and photographic images of the anus to differentiate between users when sitting down.

Data from the tests is deposited into a secure cloud server for analysis, according to the team who built the tool at Stanford University.

Journal Reference:
Seung-min Park, Daeyoun D. Won, Brian J. Lee et al. "A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta", Nature Biomedical Engineering (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41551-020-0534-9)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.coindesk.com/decentralized-protocol-removed-from-eu-contact-tracing-website-with-no-notice:

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) consortium, which is charged with helping develop the protocols for a privacy-focused European Union contact tracing system, has removed any mention of the decentralized protocol proposal Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP3T) from its website.

Contact tracing is the process by which health authorities track the spread of viruses, identifying who has been in contact with infected individuals and should therefore be quarantined. Countries are pursuing a variety of digital methods of doing so, ranging from location tracking of cell phones and facial recognition, to digital health passes that restrict movement and Bluetooth proximity tracing. Last weekend, Google and Apple announced a plan to update their mobile operating systems to allow Bluetooth tracing.

Any E.U. contact tracing would have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which ensures greater privacy and data protection for EU citizens than is currently enforced in the U.S.

[...] The DP3T team, which outlined its proposal to CoinDesk earlier this week, was not told the protocol was being removed from the site, and was not invited to attend a PEPP-PT call Friday with the consortium's various partners, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

martyb writes:

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position:

The recovery quest by MEV-1, a Mission Extension Vehicle probe developed by Northrop Grumman to fix the Intelsat 901 comms satellite, now has the bird up and running again.

Launched in 2001, Intelsat 901 supports satellite television and internet communications to countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and ships in between them. In December 2019, customers relying on the ailing hunk of metal were transferred to other Intersat [sic] satellites and it was booted to a “graveyard orbit,” where defunct satellites are placed to avoid interfering with other functioning kit.

Grumman’s spacecraft arrived in February this year. It attached itself to the Intelsat 901 and used its electric propulsion modules to drag the satellite back into a geosynchronous orbit.

Now, the satellite has been given a new lease of life and can maintain its communications with Earth for at least another five years. Its previous 30 customers have now been transferred back to the satellite and all systems are in the pipe, five by five.

This is the first time that two commercial spacecrafts have docked in orbit for this purpose, and could extend the life of many other satellites. The MEV-1 has a grappling mechanical system that attached to Intersat [sic] 901 and then used its engines to take over the satellite’s attitude and orbital maintenance.

Should new satellites be designed for repair? Or should they be made less expensively because cheaper access to space (à la SpaceX), makes it less expensive to just replace one when it falters?

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade

The flight from the Kennedy Space Center would send NASA astronauts to the space station

It’s been nearly 10 years since the last NASA astronauts launched from United States soil — a long, ignominious streak that’s been compounded by delays and technical challenges.

But now, finally, the space agency on Friday set the date for when it will fly its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast again: May 27.

While the date could change — in spaceflight they often do — the announcement marks a significant milestone in NASA’s winding, at times tortuous, journey to regain its human spaceflight wings since it retired the space shuttle in 2011.

[...] This time, though, the launch will be markedly different than any other in the history of the space agency. Unlike Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the space shuttle era, the rocket will be owned and operated not by NASA, but by a private company — SpaceX, the hard-charging commercial space company founded by Elon Musk.

For all the company’s triumphs, and its experience flying cargo to the International Space Station for NASA, it has never flown a single human being into space, a significant and dangerous challenge. NASA has spent years working with the California-based company to ensure its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft can safely deliver astronauts to orbit. And the flight would be the culmination of years of work, which has at times seen setbacks and delays.

[...] With a successful launch, SpaceX would accomplish an upset over its rival, Boeing, which also has been under contract from NASA to fly crews to the space station as part of NASA’s “commercial crew program.

SpaceX is screwing up the grading curve for everyone else.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

With all of the Pandemic precautions that have been put into effect, many people are turning to "free" on-line conferencing services. As the saying goes, "If you are not paying for the service, you are the product". And, even if paid for (by yourself or by an employer), that does not mean freedom from having your information mined for advertising or other purposes.

I've not used any of the following, so please forgive me if I got the product names incorrect. Here are some of the big "free" services that I've seen mentioned: Zoom (whose security issues have been cited many times on SoylentNews), Apple (Group Facetime), Google (Hangouts), Facebook (Facebook Live) and Microsoft (Teams).

I suspect many Soylentils have now acquired some experience with on-line conferencing. I am hoping to draw upon your experience. Better still, I would love to see development and proliferation of alternatives to the "Big Names". Solutions that are self-hosted and as free as reasonably possible from the prying eyes of the big, data-warehousing corporations. Open source — free as in beer and libre — would be good, too

[Ed Note: I debated whether or not to run this submission. This could be perceived as a relatively innocuous change. But what's next? Back in 1982 there was a huge outcry when National Geographic "moved" the Great Pyramids closer together. Back then, technological advances increased the ease by which images could be manipulated without detection. Technology has continued marching forward. Now, the same manipulations are starting to appear with video. What's next? What are the limits. Where does it end? I saw an opportunity for discussion and decided to run the story.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

With great digital platforms comes great digital enhancements? Following on from changes to Star Wars no one asked for (Who shot first?) comes Disney+ hilariously censors nudity in classic movie Splash:

One film in particular, Splash, made its debut on Disney+ in February, but some detail-oriented fans are only now noticing a bit of a hairy situation in the movie that they didn’t see before. Viewer Allison Pregler pointed out on Twitter that one scene in the 1984 rom-com on Disney+ looks different than the original version, thanks to some CGI movie trickery.

[...] Pregler noticed that the scene where Madison (Daryl Hannah) kisses Allen (Tom Hanks) on a beach, then turns around and dives into the water was, uh, a little different.

If you’re unfamiliar with Splash, it’s about a man who falls in love with a mermaid. So, in this scene, Madison doesn’t have any clothes on because she’s on land, and when she pivots towards the ocean, the version available on Disney+ shows CGI hair on her backside instead of bare flesh.

Disney+ didn't want butts on their platform so they edited Splash with digital fur technology pic.twitter.com/df8XE0G9om

— Allison Pregler 📼 (@AllisonPregler) April 13, 2020

If you look quickly you could miss the edit, but it’s not a subtle one. While Madison’s hair ends at her lower back, the CGI hair looks like a second layer applied underneath, so you can clearly see the gap between where the real hair ends and where the edit begins.

Follow the Twitter link to see the "updated" video.

According to the story submitter: "Can't say I really noticed in the first place."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The question of "how did supermarkets sell out of months worth of toilet paper in days" has been answered in part:

John-Paul Drake, an executive with South Australian supermarket chain Drakes, said he refused to give the man a refund.

"I had my first customer yesterday who said he wanted to get a refund on 150 packets of 32-pack toilet paper and 150 units of one-litre sanitiser." In 150 packs of 32-roll toilet paper there would be 4800 individual rolls.

Mr Drake said the man had come into the store to get his money back after website eBay refused to allow him to sell the items online.

[...] In a later LinkedIn post, Mr Drake said the customer hadn't bought the loo roll and hand sanitiser in one trip, but claimed that he had run a sophisticated operation that saw up to 20 people visit several Drakes stores buying a pack in each one.

If you don't need it then don't buy it.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Federal Communications Commission is set to approve a new 5G cellular network despite claims from the Department of Defense that it will interfere with Global Positioning System (GPS) services.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today asked fellow commissioners to approve an "application to deploy a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-Band that would primarily support 5G and Internet of Things services." The application is from Ligado, formerly known as LightSquared, which for nearly a decade has sought permission to build a wireless network using frequencies near those used for GPS. A previous failure to obtain FCC approval helped push LightSquared into bankruptcy.

[...] The base-station power reduction is "from 32dBW to 9.8dBW," and Ligado committed to a 23MHz "guard-band using its own licensed spectrum to further separate its terrestrial base station transmissions from neighboring operation," the FCC said.

"As such, Ligado is now only seeking terrestrial use of the 1526-1536MHz, 1627.5-1637.5MHz, and 1646.5-1656.5MHz bands. The Order is conditioned to reflect these technical requirements. It also requires Ligado to protect adjacent band incumbents by reporting its base station locations and technical operating parameters to potentially affected government and industry stakeholders prior to commencing operations, continuously monitoring the transmit power of its base station sites, and complying with procedures and actions for responding to credible reports of interference, including rapid shutdown of operations where warranted," the FCC said.

[...] Ligado previously planned a 4G network, but the years-long delay resulted in the switch to 5G.

-- submitted from IRC

See Wikipedia's GPS Signals - Overview of Frequencies as well as this list on RF Wireless World.

Original Submission