SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] When it began observations in 2000, TAMA300 was one of the world's first large-scale interferometric gravitational wave detectors. At that time TAMA300 had the highest sensitivity in the world, setting an upper limit on the strength of gravitational wave signals; but the first detection of actual gravitational waves was made 15 years later in 2015 by LIGO. Since then detector technology has improved to the point that modern detectors are observing several signals per month. The scientific results obtained from these observations are already impressive and many more are expected in the next decades. TAMA300 is no longer participating in observations, but is still active, acting as a testbed for new technologies to improve other detectors.

The sensitivity of current and future gravitational wave detectors is limited at almost all the frequencies by quantum noise caused by the effects of vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic fields. But even this inherent quantum noise can be sidestepped. It is possible to manipulate the vacuum fluctuations to redistribute the quantum uncertainties, deceasing[sic] one type of noise at the expense of increasing a different, less obstructive type of noise. This technique, known as vacuum squeezing, has already been implemented in gravitational wave detectors, greatly increasing their sensitivity to higher frequency gravitational waves. But the optomechanical interaction between the electromagnetic field and the mirrors of the detector cause the effects of vacuum squeezing to change depending on the frequency. So at low frequencies vacuum squeezing increases the wrong type of noise, actually degrading sensitivity.

To overcome this limitation and achieve reduced noise at all frequencies, a team at NAOJ composed of members of the in-house Gravitational Wave Science Project and the KAGRA collaboration (but also including researchers of the Virgo and GEO collaborations) has recently demonstrated the feasibility of a technique known as frequency dependent vacuum squeezing, at the frequencies useful for gravitational wave detectors.

-- submitted from IRC

More Information: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10672

Original Submission

takyon writes:

GPUs Unleashed: Intel Releases First Unlocked GPU Driver For OEM Systems

While Intel's integrated GPUs have made immense strides over the past decade, there's been one particular legacy they've been unable to break free from: OEM driver locking. Due to the large degree of customization and optimization that OEMs sometimes do to their systems, some OEMs have insisted on having video drivers "locked" to their platforms, so that only video drivers that they've customized and distributed can be installed.

This structure has always offered at least a modicum of utility, ensuring that newer drivers don't break things or otherwise interfere with those system customizations. But as desktops and laptops live longer than ever, OEM have demonstrated a shorter attention span than Intel when it comes to driver updates. As a result, unfortunate system owners have found themselves stuck in a bind with older (and even some newer) systems, where there are newer drivers with important bug fixes for games and applications, but those drivers can't be installed because they haven't been customized and approved by the OEM.

Thankfully, it looks like the days of Intel OEM driver locking are finally behind us. Yesterday evening Intel released a new version of its Windows 10 GPU driver, version 26.20.100.8141, that's fully unlocked, allowing it to be installed on virtually all OEM systems for the first time. And while there are a handful of catches, ultimately this driver should work with most OEM systems that are running a current, supported version of Windows 10 on top of an Intel Gen9 or later iGPU.

Also at ZDNet and Wccftech.

See also: Intel Sends Initial Linux 5.8 Graphics Driver Updates - Adds Ability For Tapping Full EU Perf, More Tiger Lake Bits
Intel Landing More Driver Work Needed For Discrete GPU Linux Support
Intel Media Driver 20.2.pre1 Released With More Work Towards Gen12 + Discrete GPUs
Intel Gen11+ Graphics See An Easy Bump On Mesa 20.1-devel

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

In a paper published in Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

UNSW Science's Professor John Webb says the fine structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism—one of the four fundamental forces in nature (the others are gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force).

"The fine structure constant is the quantity that physicists use as a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force," Professor Webb says.

"It's a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck's constant and the electron charge, and it's a ratio of those things. And it's the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Nonverbal learning disability (NVLD), a poorly understood and often-overlooked disorder that causes problems with visual-spatial processing, may affect nearly 3 million children in the United States, making it one of the most common learning disorders, according to a new study by led by Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The study, the first to estimate the prevalence of NVLD in the general population, was published online today in JAMA Network Open.

"NVLD is a huge and hidden public health burden," said Jeffrey Lieberman, Chair of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. "This important work might never have come to light if not for the support of dedicated advocate and their philanthropic support. We hope that these findings raise awareness of the disorder and lead to an understanding of its neurobiology and better treatments."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Scientists explore the power of radio waves to help control fusion reactions:

A key challenge to capturing and controlling fusion energy on Earth is maintaining the stability of plasma -- the electrically charged gas that fuels fusion reactions -- and keeping it millions of degrees hot to launch and maintain fusion reactions. This challenge requires controlling magnetic islands, bubble-like structures that form in the plasma in doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion facilities. These islands can grow, cool the plasma and trigger disruptions -- the sudden release of energy stored in the plasma -- that can halt fusion reactions and seriously damage the fusion facilities that house them.

Research by scientists at Princeton University and at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) points toward improved control of the troublesome magnetic islands in ITER, the international tokamak under construction in France, and other future fusion facilities that cannot allow large disruptions. "This research could open the door to improved control schemes previously deemed unobtainable," said Eduardo Rodriguez, a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics and first author of a paper in Physics of Plasmas that reports the findings.

The research follows up on previous work by Allan Reiman and Nat Fisch, which identified a new effect called "RF [radio frequency] current condensation" that can greatly facilitate the stabilization of magnetic islands. The new Physics of Plasmas paper shows how to make optimal use of the effect. Reiman is a Distinguished Research Fellow at PPPL and Fisch is a Princeton University professor and Director of the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics and Associate Director of Academic Affairs at PPPL.

[...] The new paper, based on a simplified analytical model, focuses on use of RF waves to heat the islands and drive electric current that causes them to shrink and disappear. When the temperature gets sufficiently high, complicated interactions can occur that lead to the RF current condensation effect, which concentrates the current in the center of the island and can greatly enhance the stabilization. But as the temperature increases, and the gradient of the temperature between the colder edge and the hot interior of the island grows larger, the gradient can drive instabilities that make it more difficult to increase the temperature further.

Journal Reference
E. Rodríguez, A. H. Reiman, N. J. Fisch. RF current condensation in the presence of turbulent enhanced transport, Physics of Plasmas (DOI: 10.1063/5.0001881)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

MIT researchers have built a system that fools natural-language processing systems by swapping words with synonyms:

The software, developed by a team at MIT, looks for the words in a sentence that are most important to an NLP classifier and replaces them with a synonym that a human would find natural. For example, changing the sentence "The characters, cast in impossibly contrived situations, are totally estranged from reality" to "The characters, cast in impossibly engineered circumstances, are fully estranged from reality" makes no real difference to how we read it. But the tweaks made an AI interpret the sentences completely differently.

The results of this adversarial machine learning attack are impressive:

For example, Google's powerful BERT neural net was worse by a factor of five to seven at identifying whether reviews on Yelp were positive or negative.

The paper:

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast extend vow to not cut off service amid COVID-19 crisis:

The nation's largest wireless and broadband companies are extending their promise to not disconnect service through June 30, in an effort to help customers through the COVID-19 crisis. In March, these service providers voluntarily signed on to the Federal Communications Commission's Keep Americans Connected pledge.

Wireless providers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, along with the nation's largest cable provider, Comcast, have each extended for another seven weeks their commitment to not charge late fees or disconnect service of customers who can't pay their bills. Comcast has also said it'll extend its free offer of the Internet Essentials program for low-income individuals through the end of June. And the cable giant said it will suspend requirements that prevent eligible customers from taking advantage of the service if they have an outstanding balance with the company.

[...] More than 700 broadband and wireless companies have signed on to the pledge, according to the FCC. As part of the pledge, wireless and cable broadband providers have opened up their public Wi-Fi hotspots for free, promised not to terminate service if subscribers can't pay and waived overage and late fees.

AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon each said they won't terminate service or charge late fees for residential or small-business customers so long as customers notify the companies about their inability to pay due to the coronavirus crisis.

The pledge and its extension also applies to home broadband and TV services from AT&T and Verizon.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TurkeyWaddle:

Shade (Troldesh) ransomware shuts down and releases decryption keys:

The operators of the Shade (Troldesh) ransomware have shut down over the weekend and, as a sign of goodwill, have released more than 750,000 decryption keys that past victims can now use to decrypt their files.

Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab have confirmed the validity of the leaked keys and are now working on creating a free decryption tool.

[...] The decryption keys released today will help all users who had files encrypted by the Shade ransomware. The keys are believed to account for all versions of the ransomware and all users who ever got infected.

[...] While security experts often recommend saving ransomware-encrypted files on an offline hard drive, most victims simply reinstall their computer from scratch, deleting the encrypted data. Those who saved their encrypted files can now recover data they once considered lost.

The Shade team posted on their GitHub repository:

We are the team which created a trojan-encryptor mostly known as Shade, Troldesh or Encoder.858. In fact, we stopped its distribution in the end of 2019. Now we made a decision to put the last point in this story and to publish all the decryption keys we have (over 750 thousands at all). We are also publishing our decryption soft; we also hope that, having the keys, antivirus companies will issue their own more user-friendly decryption tools. All other data related to our activity (including the source codes of the trojan) was irrevocably destroyed. We apologize to all the victims of the trojan and hope that the keys we published will help them to recover their data.

Original Submission

DannyB submitted a story which was the inspiration for:

After prolonged service outage, Petnet shuts down, citing coronavirus:

Cloud-connected, "smart" automated pet-feeder system Petnet has had a rough spring. The service not only went offline in February, but all its customer service vanished, too, leaving users in the dark until the company apologized and pushed a patch more than a week later. The service briefly returned for some users but fell off again in March. Now, after weeks of silence, the company is blaming COVID-19 for driving it offline for good—even though its problems started weeks or months before the novel coronavirus became a significant concern.

[...] "Last week on April 14, 2020, we briefed all of our customers regarding one of our third-party connected vendor's inability to fully resource their company and stay functionally online," the message reads. "As of this writing, this situation remains unresolved but we are confident it will be overcome soon."

But due to the exceptional circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic has created, Petnet went on, many of its vendors—largely startups like itself—were "severely and negatively affected in their day to day operations." In short: the funding dried up. Due to a lack of funds, Petnet said, it "re-prioritized and reorganized [its] resources," including:

• We have furloughed 100% of our remaining staff
• We have ceased all future product development, including bug fixes
• We have turned off all non-infrastructure related expenses
• We have terminated our office lease and are working remotely
• We have applied for all available CARES stimulus funding

Previously:
(2020-02-28) Petnet's Smart Pet Feeder System Back after Week-Long Outage
(2016-07-30) Cats, Dogs Go Hungry as Internet-Connected PetNet Plays Dead

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TurkeyWaddle:

Starship chilled. Starship pressurized. And for the first time, it didn't explode:

This marks an important moment in the Starship program. Since November 2019, the company has lost three full-scale Starship prototypes during cryogenic and pressure tests. The most recent failure came on April 3. This is the first time a vehicle has survived pressure testing to advance to further work. Such tests are designed to ensure the integrity of a rocket's fueling system prior to lighting an engine.

SN4 passed cryo proof! pic.twitter.com/EJakThZRGF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2020

Now, Musk said, SpaceX engineers will attach a single Raptor engine to this vehicle and conduct a static fire test. The company hopes to move forward with this test later in the week.

Should the static fire test be successful, Musk has said the SN4 vehicle will make a 150-meter "hop" test, much as the "Starhopper" prototype performed in August 2019. The company has yet to receive regulatory approval for this test, so it may not happen for several weeks.

SpaceX already has fabricated most of the parts for its SN5 vehicle, which may be the first prototype to attempt a higher flight. Musk said, if all goes well with SN4, the plan is to attach three Raptors to SN5 for a higher flight test later this spring.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Spring Issue of 2600 Released - Important News :

[For those who may be unfamiliar: 2600: The Hacker Quarterly "is an American seasonal publication of technical information and articles [...] on a variety of subjects including hacking, telephone switching systems, Internet protocols and services, as well as general news concerning the computer 'underground.'" --Ed.]

It gets worse. Our previous issue (the one still on stands) can't be sold to Barnes and Noble "curbside pickup" customers even though most everything else in their stores can be. Why? It's their "policy" that magazines can't be sold this way and that policy can't be changed despite the current circumstances. It makes no sense at all to us. Our issues are right there in the store yet they can't be sold to customers.

Rather than working out options where we might have a chance at survival, we're being told that we have to figure out what to do with all these issues or pay a penalty for not shipping them. We find ourselves in the middle of a Kafka novel where everything is stacked against the publisher because that's just how it is.

We've seen injustices before where distributors have gone out of business without paying us, sometimes simply changing their name and continuing to make millions while we don't get a dime. But this time it's different. This time what's happening affects all of us, and what we were hoping we'd see was a sense of community where we all supported one another and helped everyone get through this terrible crisis. That most certainly hasn't been the case in the publishing world.

We honestly don't know if we'll be able to publish another issue. We intend to try once we know if there's a plan or any sort of relief we can take advantage of. We haven't seen much encouragement from landlords, banks, and insurance companies who can't help and all insist on getting paid in full and on time. Meanwhile, those entities owing us checks say they can't pay us at all. Something has to give.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For a decade, a Mount Morgan cave in central Queensland known for the highest dinosaur track diversity on the entire eastern half of Australia has been closed to the public, restricting research to the site.

Although UQ palaeontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio has had success searching for images of the tracks, he has only recently been provided with new images of different dinosaur's footprints at the site by the Mount Morgan Historical Museum.

[...] "A typical dinosaur track of this kind look like those made by birds, but these are shaped like broad-handled forks."

Upon further inspection, Dr. Romilio revealed that the dinosaur must have created the tracks while crouched.

[...] "It's very strange behaviour, and we don't yet know why it did this," Dr. Romilio said.

"You can rule out predatory stalking behaviour, as this set of tracks was made by a two-legged plant eater called an ornithopod.

[...] "This unusual posture likely made the prehistoric animal more stable allowing them to quickly cross the muddy shore of an ancient lake."

[...] "Many of the Mount Morgan track sites were mapped in the early 2000s, although these footprints don't appear on any of them.

"It may be that these fossils had already eroded, making these, and other old photos like them, so incredibly important, as they're our only record of these creature's existence."

More information: Anthony Romilio. Additional notes on the Mount Morgan dinosaur tracks from the Lower Jurassic (Sinemurian) Razorback beds, Queensland, Australia., Historical Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2020.1755853

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200420/06583844328/fancy-that-comcasts-network-holding-up-fine-without-usage-caps.shtml

For many years in the early aughts, broadband providers insisted they needed to impose usage caps and costly overage fees to help manage network congestion. By 2015, leaked documents from Comcast revealed that was never true. In the years since, even industry CEOs have acknowledged that the limits are little more than an additional tax on captive customers in uncompetitive U.S. broadband markets.

As COVID-19 struck, ISPs quickly bowed to pressure to eliminate such restrictions so home-bound Americans weren't inundated with significantly higher bills. In a press release, Comcast makes it clear that its network has (gasp), performed perfectly well under the added load -- despite a 32% increase in upstream traffic and 18% increase in downstream traffic. There's been a 77% surge in gaming downloads, a 37% bump in streaming video consumption, and a 228% bump in VOIP and teleconferencing use. This is, Comcast says, causing no issues for Comcast:

"Our ongoing, proactive network investment to add fiber and capacity has put us in a good position to manage the increases that we are experiencing today. While the COVID-19 experience is new and unprecedented, the Internet ecosystem is flexible and performing the way it was designed. We engineer the network to handle spikes and shifts in usage, and what we have seen so far with COVID-19 is within our capacity."

Many ISPs, like Comcast, backed off the "congestion" claims a few years ago after their own memos, and numerous researchers and journalists, kept debunking them.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

On its 15th birthday, the Airbus A380 is facing retirement:

Big, burly and a bit bulbous, the Airbus A380 has never been the sleekest airliner in the skies. I'm not disputing that it's an engineering achievement, because it certainly is. The largest commercial aircraft ever to fly, it delivers a supremely smooth and quiet ride for passengers. On my first A380 flight, five years ago, it felt like we were hovering noiselessly as the British Airways giant descended over San Francisco Bay. It took the San Mateo Bridge flashing by my window to remind me that, yes, we were actually moving.

It's just that from the outside, the double-decker Airbus A380 looks like, well... a bus. Enormous? Yes, Powerful? Absolutely. Elegant? Not so much. One snarkier nickname for it is "the flying forehead." But even so, I respect what the superjumbo represents and I'll eagerly wish it a happy birthday. Fifteen years ago today, April 27, the A380 flew for the first time. Since then, it's been a hit with passengers, even if its commercial success hasn't been what Airbus originally hoped. There's nothing like it in the sky today, and as Airbus winds down production completely by 2021, hastened by the coronavirus pandemic, there never will be again.

[...] The coronavirus pandemic has now grounded almost all A380s in service, but the end of the program came in February 2019 when Airbus announced it would stop A380 production and deliver the last aircraft by 2021. "Today's announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in a release at the time. "But, keep in mind that A380s will still roam the skies for many years to come and Airbus will of course continue to fully support the A380 operators." Around the same time, the first two A380s were scrapped for parts after flying for only a decade. Ten years is an incredibly short life for an aircraft -- it's not unusual to fly on planes more than twice that age.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Lenovo is joining Dell in the "OEM Linux Laptop" club:

It looks like Lenovo may upstage Dell as the big name in OEM Linux laptops—not counting specialty retailers like System76, of course. Red Hat and Lenovo are announcing pre-installed and factory-supported Fedora Workstation on several models of ThinkPad laptops at Red Hat Summit this week.

Dell's Linux support has generally been limited to one or two very specific laptops—first, the old Atom-powered netbooks and, more recently, the XPS 13 Developer Edition line. Lenovo is planning a significantly broader Linux footprint in its lineup.

Fedora Workstation will be a selectable option during purchase for the Thinkpad P1 Gen2, Thinkpad P53, and Thinkpad X1 Gen8 laptops—and Lenovo may offer even broader model support in the future. Lenovo Senior Linux Developer Mark Pearson, who will be the featured guest in the May 2020 Fedora Council Video Meeting, expresses the company's stance on forthcoming integration:

Lenovo is excited to become a part of the Fedora community. We want to ensure an optimal Linux experience on our products. We are committed to working with and learning from the open source community.

Original Submission