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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

The New Yorker adds co-op to its online crossword puzzles:

I never knew I wanted online co-op in a crossword app, but The New Yorker has added the feature to its online puzzles. Turns out, it's a really great way to solve a puzzle with a partner.

As each of you fills in answers, those will show up on the other person's screen almost immediately

From there, you'll each be able to click or tap around to solve the puzzle. The row or column that matches the clue you're looking at will be highlighted in blue, while the row or column your friend is looking at will be highlighted in green. As each of you fills in answers, those will show up on the other person's screen almost immediately.

I had a lot of fun working on today's puzzle on my computer with my wife, who was on her phone. The co-solving allowed us to each focus on different clues, and there were a few times where one of us would fill in a clue and the other would jump in to fill out another one because we saw something we had missed before.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soybull:

FCC blasted for "shameful" ruling against cities and fire department:

The Federal Communications Commission is in another dispute with the fire department that fought for net neutrality rules after being throttled by Verizon during a wildfire response.

The Santa Clara County Central Fire Protection District, along with the cities of Los Angeles and New York, last week asked the FCC to extend a deadline for filing comments on the last remaining piece of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's net neutrality repeal. Pai had to seek another round of public comments on the net neutrality repeal and related deregulation of the broadband industry because federal judges who upheld the overall repeal ruled that Pai "failed to examine the implications of its decisions for public safety."

The fire department and cities said they couldn't meet the FCC's comments deadline because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the FCC refused to grant more time for filing comments in an order issued yesterday, resulting in condemnation from the Santa Clara County Fire Department, Democrats, and consumer advocates.

"When the Trump FCC repealed net neutrality two years ago, it completely ignored public safety," US Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) said. "Santa Clara County firefighters paid a steep price when Verizon throttled their data speeds as they fought the worst fire in California's history, and the County was helpless to resolve the issue... Now, when these same first responders of the Santa Clara County Fire Department are requesting a very reasonable extension to file their comments in the FCC's order because they are on the front lines in responding to the worst pandemic of our lifetimes, Chairman Pai has ignored their pleas. The FCC's decision is shameful, offensive, and dangerous. The FCC must rethink this decision immediately."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Fandango is buying Vudu's video service from Walmart:

Fandango has agreed to buy Vudu from Walmart for an undisclosed sum. Although Fandango has its own streaming platform, FandangoNow, it's not planning to shut down Vudu and roll it into that service. The Vudu app will remain available, and you'll still have access to the movies and TV shows you own there. You can still use your Walmart credentials to login and make purchases on Vudu with your Walmart wallet.

[...] Fandango isn't exactly selling many movie tickets right now, as almost all theaters (save for some drive-ins) are closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Streaming, on the other hand, is booming, so adding Vudu to the portfolio might help Fandango's bottom line in the long run. Comcast, which is the majority owner of Fandango, is in the midst of launching another streaming service: NBCUniversal's Peacock.

Original Submission

[20200422_200816 UTC: Update: Launch was successful. The first-stage booster functioned nominally and successfully landed on a drone ship. The second stage successfully deployed the satellites at an altitude of approximately 250 km. The satellites will use on-board ion thrusters to raise their orbits up to a planned 550 km altitude. No word on this flight's fairing recovery attempt.--martyb]

martyb writes:

SpaceX returns to the launch pad, and there are a few things to watch for:

SpaceX has targeted Wednesday afternoon for the next launch of its Falcon 9 rocket from a pad at Kennedy Space Center. This mission will launch the sixth batch of operational Starlink satellites, bringing the company closer to offering initial broadband Internet access to North America.

However, the Starlink-6 launch—set for 3:37pm ET (19:37 UTC)[*]—is notable for reasons beyond the simple extension of the company's Starlink network.

[...] SpaceX has gotten pretty darn good at landing first stages back on Earth, as they have now done it 50 times. However, the company failed to successfully land the first stage on an autonomous drone ship the last two times it attempted to do so.

On February 17, after the Starlink-4 launch, the first stage received incorrect data about wind conditions near the landing location and missed the drone ship. Then, on March 18, one of the rocket's nine Merlin 1D engines failed during launch, and although the Starlink-5 satellites made orbit, this precluded a fully controlled return of the first stage.

[...] It is notable that SpaceX pushed up this week's launch from Thursday to Wednesday, citing a "more favorable weather forecast for launch and landing." Launch conditions on Wednesday are more favorable (90-percent chance of "go" weather) than Thursday, but seas, too, should be considerably less choppy in the landing zone offshore. This increases the chance of success.

[*] Rescheduled: As of 09:56 this Wednesday morning, this tweet states: "New T-0 of 3:30 p.m. EDT, 19:30 UTC, for today's launch of Starlink". For further updates, keep an eye on SpaceX's twitter fed.

Live stream on YouTube to start 10 minutes before liftoff.

I remember SpaceX's first successful landing and how amazing it was. Now they have succeeded 50(!) times and it has become so 'commonplace' we are surprised when they do not succeed in landing a booster!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soybull:

Ancient recipes led scientists to a long-lost natural blue:

The pigment, called folium, graced the pages of medieval manuscripts. But it fell out of use, and the watercolor’s identity has eluded scientists for decades. Now, after tracking down folium’s source, researchers have mapped out the chemical structure for its blue-producing molecule.

Such chemical information can be key to art conservation. “We want to mimic these ancient colors to know how to … preserve them,” says Maria Melo, a conservation scientist at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Caparica, Portugal. But to unmask folium’s identity, Melo and her team first had to find where it came from.

The researchers turned to medieval texts that described the source plant. With the help of a botanist, they discovered Chrozophora tinctoria, a tiny herb with silvery-green foliage. In a village in the south of Portugal, the team found the wild plant growing along the roadside and in fields after harvest. Back in the lab, researchers extracted the pigment from its pebble-sized fruits by following directions detailed in the medieval manuscripts. “It was really great fun to recover these recipes,” Melo says.

Journal Reference:
P. Nabais et al. "A 1000-year-old mystery solved: Unlocking the molecular structure for the medieval blue from Chrozophora tinctoria, also known as folium". Science Advances. Published online April 17, 2020. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz7772.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

'Right to repair' taken up by the ACCC in farmers' fight to fix their own tractors:

The 'right to repair' movement has finally bent the ear of Australia's competition and consumer watchdog, the ACCC, in its pleas to be able to fix their own farm equipment.

[...] Farmers have emerged as an unlikely force in the global right to repair movement.

The movement eschews the disposable culture of consumer electronics in favour of letting independent repairers and home tinkerers fix broken smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Proponents want access to the code that makes modern machines hum, putting them at loggerheads with tech giants including Apple who own the proprietary software.

In the United States, farmers have risked voiding their warranties by hacking their own John Deere tractors with torrented software so they can carry out their own repairs.

[...] In its first deep dive into the modern agricultural machinery market, the ACCC published its discussion paper on the matter in late February and is seeking accounts from those who buy and use farm machinery, or repair it for a living.

"Broadacre croppers with large tractors, harvesters, seeders … and particularly tractors seem to be an area of some contention," Mr Keogh said.

"We have heard from dealers who say that they have no issues with providing service, yet we hear from independent service providers that they can't get access to the [software] diagnostic tools they need.

"In some cases they can't get access to the [manufacturers'] parts they need.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Known as Skeeter, the secretive project has cracked the challenge of using flapping wings to power a drone. While wings are more efficient than a propeller and allow a dragonfly to hover in the face of strong gusts they are almost impossible for human engineers to emulate.

"Making devices with flapping wings is very, very hard" says Mr Caccia. Helicopters manoeuvre by changing the pitch of rotor blades to go forward and backward or to hover. For smaller objects hovering is a major challenge.

"A dragonfly is an awesome flyer" says Alex Caccia, "It's just insane how beautiful they are, nothing is left to chance in that design. It has very sophisticated flight control."

The dragonfly does have 300 million years of evolution on its side. Animal Dynamics has spent four years writing software that operates the hand-launched drone like an insect and allows it to hover in gusts of more than 20 knots (23mph or 37km/h). From 22 to 27 knots is classed as a "strong breeze".

[...] It is currently around eight inches long, but production versions are planned to be smaller. Squeezing a lot of aerodynamic and navigational wisdom into a diminutive package is nature's prerogative but was a big challenge for Animal Dynamics. "We started small to learn hard lessons" as Alex Caccia puts it.

[...] Under the family name of DelFly, the creation from TU Delft weighs less than 50g, and takes inspiration from the wing movement of fruit flies. DelFly's four wings consist of an ultra-light transparent foil powered by a light, economical motor, which lets it fly for six to nine minutes.

The project worked beautifully until "due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100: New Low Cost Quad-Core Zen 2 Processors From $99

If one were critiquing AMD's current line of Zen 2 processors, one of the things to note is that the cheapest option is $199, for the six-core Ryzen 5 3600. This puts the latest hardware from AMD out of reach for anyone building a gaming $900 system or below. In order to redress this balance, AMD is set to launch two new quad core designs in May, starting at $99. The new Ryzen 3 hardware will each feature one Zen 2 core chiplet, run at up to 4.3 GHz, and offer PCIe 4.0 connectivity.

A few years ago, the quad core processor was at the top of the market, and you would need $500 for one. When AMD started launching its quad core parts for as little as $99, the market became interested in what would become the new normal. These new Ryzen 3 parts from AMD, the new low-end quad cores, are helping define that normal, especially with high frequencies and taking advantage of the latest features such as high-speed DDR4, Zen 2 levels of IPC at high frequencies, and PCIe 4.0.

[...] One of the often talked topics, since January, is when AMD is going to launch its more mid-range B550 motherboards for the Ryzen 3000 processors. Today AMD is announcing that B550 is coming on June 16th this year, with all the main motherboard manufacturers coming out with a variety of models, up to 60 for launch. AMD is also confirming that B550 will offer PCIe 4.0 connectivity. More details to come at a later date.

The Ryzen 3 3300X ($120) and Ryzen 3 3100 ($100) quad-cores are compared to the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 AF, which is $85 for 6 cores, 12 threads on a "12nm+" process node. These would compete with upcoming Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs from Intel, which are expected to launch on May 27.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

New Cloudflare tool can tell you if your ISP has deployed BGP fixes:

For more than an hour at the beginning of April, major sites like Google and Facebook sputtered for large swaths of people. The culprit wasn't a hack or a bug. It was problems with the internet data routing standard known as the Border Gateway Protocol, which had allowed significant amounts of web traffic to take an unexpected detour through a Russian telecom. For Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, it was the last straw.

BGP disruptions happen frequently, generally by accident. But BGP can also be hijacked for large-scale spying, data interception, or as a sort of denial of service attack. Just last week, United States Executive Branch agencies moved to block China Telecom from offering services in the US, because of allegedly malicious activity that includes BGP attacks. Companies like Cloudflare sit on the front lines of the BGP blowback. And while the company can't fix the problem directly, it can call out those that are slow to contribute defenses.

On Friday, the company launched Is BGP Safe Yet​, a site that makes it easier for anyone to check whether their internet service provider has added the security protections and filters that can make BGP more stable. Those improvements are most effective with wide adoption from ISPs, content delivery networks like Cloudflare, and other cloud providers. Cloudflare estimates that so far about half of the internet is more protected thanks to heavy hitters like AT&T, the Swedish telecom Telia, and the Japanese telecom NTT adopting BGP improvements. And while Cloudflare says it doesn't seem like the Rostelecom incident was intentional or malicious, Russian telecoms do have a history of suspicious BGP meddling, and similar problems will keep cropping up until the whole industry is on board.​

[...] "BGP is a 40-plus-year-old protocol, it's a miracle the internet has worked on what is really just a trust-based system for as long as it has," Prince says. "Obviously it makes sense to have more verification, because anything else is madness. And yet! It's taken a long time to actually get that implemented. Hopefully we can put a little bit of public pressure on."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

This Open-Source Program Deepfakes You During Zoom Meetings, in Real Time:

Video conferencing apps like Zoom and Skype are usually boring and often frustrating. With more people than ever using this software to work from home, users are finding new ways to spice up endless remote meetings and group hangs by looping videos of themselves looking engaged, adding wacky backgrounds, and now, using deepfake filters for impersonating celebrities when you're tired of your own face staring back at you in the front-facing camera window.

Avatarify is a program that superimposes someone else's face onto yours in real-time, during video meetings. The code is available on Github for anyone to use.

Programmer Ali Aliev used the open-source code from the "First Order Motion Model for Image Animation," published on the arxiv preprint server earlier this year, to build Avatarify. First Order Motion, developed by researchers at the University of Trento in Italy as well as Snap, Inc., drives a photo of a person using a video of another person—such as footage of an actor—without any prior training on the target image.

With other face-swap technologies, like deepfakes, the algorithm is trained on the face you want to swap, usually requiring several images of the person's face you're trying to animate. This model can do it in real-time, by training the algorithm on similar categories of the target (like faces).

"I ran [the First Order Model] on my PC and was surprised by the result. What's important, it worked fast enough to drive an avatar real-time," Aliev told Motherboard. "Developing a prototype was a matter of a couple of hours and I decided to make fun of my colleagues with whom I have a Zoom call each Monday. And that worked. As they are all engineers and researchers, the first reaction was curiosity and we soon began testing the prototype."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Senate panel wants stricter oversight of Chinese telecoms:

[...] The Wall Street Journal understands that the Senate Permanent Subcommitee on Investigations will issue a report demanding stricter oversight of Chinese telecoms operating in the US, arguing that they otherwise pose an "unacceptable" national security risk. The panel also blasts officials for allegedly being too soft on these telecoms across multiple administrations, pointing to 18 years of supposedly lax screening.

The panel criticizes several regulators (nicknamed Team Telecom) for finding no concerns when China Telecom and China Unicom, both state-run, got licenses to operate in the US in 2002. A risk mitigation deal in 2007 gave those regulators the power to visit China Telecom, but they only used that twice (in 2017 and 2018), according to the Senate panel's findings.

American officials have stepped their scrutiny of China over the years. Team Telecom has asked the FCC to revoke China Telecom's license, and it's no secret that the US has clamped down on equipment makers like Huawei and ZTE. However, this panel could help foster an even more aggressive stance.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Supreme Court rules non-unanimous jury verdicts unconstitutional

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that defendants in criminal trials can only be convicted by a unanimous jury, striking down a scheme that has been rejected by every state except one. The court said in a divided opinion that the Constitution requires agreement among all members of a jury in order to impose a guilty verdict.

"Wherever we might look to determine what the term 'trial by an impartial jury trial' meant at the time of the Sixth Amendment's adoption—whether it's the common law, state practices in the founding era, or opinions and treatises written soon afterward—the answer is unmistakable," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in an opinion. "A jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict."

Oregon is the only state left in which defendants can be convicted over the dissent of up to two jurors. Louisiana recently abandoned the practice after more than a century of use.

The ruling overturns the 2016 conviction of a Louisiana man named Evangelisto Ramos. A jury by a 10-2 margin found him guilty of killing a woman in New Orleans. Two years after Ramos's conviction, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment getting rid of non-unanimous jury verdicts. The new ruling likely means that Ramos could get a new trial.

From the Ramos v. Louisiana syllabus:

In 48 States and federal court, a single juror's vote to acquit is enough to prevent a conviction. But two States, Louisiana and Oregon, have long punished people based on 10-to-2 verdicts. In this case, petitioner Evangelisto Ramos was convicted of a serious crime in a Louisiana court by a 10-to-2 jury verdict. Instead of the mistrial he would have received almost anywhere else, Ramos was sentenced to life without parole. He contests his conviction by a nonunanimous jury as an unconstitutional denial of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial.

Held: The judgment is reversed.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Uber accuses Levandowski of fraud, refuses to pay $179M Google judgment:

Uber says it shouldn't be on the hook for a massive $179 million judgment owed to Google by Uber's former star engineer, Anthony Levandowski. Uber made that argument in a legal filing last week to a federal bankruptcy court in California. Uber's brief portrays the situation differently than Levandowski, who told the court last month that Uber was legally obligated to pay the award.

Levandowski joined Uber in 2016 after almost a decade at Google, where he had been a leading self-driving engineer. Uber bought Levandowski's months-old self-driving startup Otto for hundreds of millions of dollars, intending to make Levandowski and his team the core of Uber's fledgling self-driving car project.

But things went sour fast. Google sued Uber, alleging that Levandowski had downloaded thousands of confidential documents before his departure and had taken them to his new job. Fearing criminal prosecution for trade secret theft—fears that proved justified—Levandowski invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify during the civil trial between Google and Uber.

Uber fired Levandowski and settled with Google. But Google continued to pursue Levandowski in arbitration, winning a $179 million award. Levandowski argues that Uber has an obligation to pay the judgment on his behalf under an indemnification deal Levandowski negotiated as part of the 2016 acquisition of his company.

But in its latest legal filing, Uber argues that it doesn't owe Levandowski anything because Levandowski used fraud to induce Uber to sign the indemnification agreement.

Previously:

• Ex-Uber Engineer Levandowski Pleads Guilty To Trade Secrets Theft
• Anthony Levandowski Ordered to Pay $179 Million to Google

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New research due to be presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) reveals that raw-type dog foods contain high levels of multidrug-resistant bacteria, including those resistant to last-line antibiotics. The potential transfer of such bacteria between dogs and humans is an international public health risk, conclude the authors who include Dr. Ana Raquel Freitas and colleagues from the Faculty of Pharmacy, UCIBIO/REQUIMTE, University of Porto, Portugal.

[...] Raw-food-based diets for dogs have grown popularity recently as a healthier choice. Increasing controversy regarding their safety is emerging, with some scientific evidence showing their role as vehicles for transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In addition, dogs have been described as reservoirs of clinically-relevant ampicillin-resistant (AmpR) Enterococcus faecium, but the source remains unknown.

In this study, the authors analysed enterococci obtained from processed (both dry and wet types) and non-processed (raw-frozen) foods of the main brands commercialised in Portugal. The study included 46 samples (22 wet, 15 dry, 9 raw-frozen) from 24 international brands, sourced from 8 supermarkets and one veterinary clinic. Samples were obtained during September to November, 2019. Raw-frozen samples were mainly constituted of salmon, chicken, turkey, calf, deer or duck, being a mixture of different meat types, fruits and vegetables.

[...] The authors conclude: "Our study demonstrates that raw-frozen-foods for dogs carry MDR enterococci including to last-line antibiotics (linezolid) for the treatment of human infections. The close contact of pets with humans and the commercialisation of the studied brands in different EU countries pose an international public health risk if transmission of such strains occurs between dogs and humans. There is strong past and recent evidence that dogs and humans share common multidrug-resistant strains of E. faecium, and thus the potential for these strains to be transmitted to humans from dogs."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Though mighty, the Milky Way and galaxies of similar mass are not without scars chronicling turbulent histories. University of California, Irvine astronomers and others have shown that clusters of supernovas can cause the birth of scattered, eccentrically orbiting suns in outer stellar halos, upending commonly held notions of how star systems have formed and evolved over billions of years.

Hyper-realistic, cosmologically self-consistent computer simulations from the Feedback in Realistic Environments 2 project enabled the scientists to model the disruptions in otherwise orderly galactic rotations. The team's work is the subject of a study published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"These highly accurate numerical simulations have shown us that it's likely the Milky Way has been launching stars in circumgalactic space in outflows triggered by supernova explosions," said senior author James Bullock, dean of UCI's School of Physical Sciences and a professor of physics & astronomy. "It's fascinating, because when multiple big stars die, the resulting energy can expel gas from the galaxy, which in turn cools, causing new stars to be born."

[...] The researchers said that while their conclusions have been drawn from simulations of galaxies forming, growing and evolving to the present day, there is actually a fair amount of observational evidence that stars are forming in outflows from galactic centers to their halos.

"In plots that compare data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission—which provides a 3-D velocity chart of stars in the Milky Way—with other maps that show stellar density and metallicity, we can see structures similar to those produced by outflow stars in our simulations," Yu said.

Journal Reference
Yu, Sijie, Bullock, James S, Wetzel, Andrew, et al. Stars made in outflows may populate the stellar halo of the Milky Way, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa522)

Original Submission