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Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk Co-Founder, Dies Aged 73

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As well as being forefathers of the synthpop that would dominate the 1980s and beyond, the title track of Trans-Europe Express was sampled in 1982 by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force for one of the earliest hip-hop hits, Planet Rock, while Computer World was hugely influential on the house and techno music that emerged from Chicago and Detroit that decade.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/06/florian-schneider-kraftwerk-co-founder-dies-aged-73

The German band he helped found toyed with ideas about technology and society, leaving a profound mark on rock, dance music and hip-hop.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/arts/music/florian-schneider-kraftwerk-dead.html

Kraftwerk won a lifetime achievement Grammy award in 2014 and the Grammy for best electronic/dance album (for live album "3-D The Catalogue") in 2018. Last fall, the band was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2020/05/06/reports-kraftwerk-co-founder-florian-schneider-dies-73/5175586002/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"Tails 4.6 is out. This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible. Changes and updates: update Tor Browser to 9.0.10; add support for Universal 2nd Factor USB security keys; update the list of applications in the Favorites applications submenu; to make it easier for new users to discover some of the core features of Tails, we added Configure persistent volume, Tails documentation, WhisperBack Error Reporting and Tails Installer, and removed Terminal; change the input method for Japanese from Anthy to Mozc. Known issues: none specific to this release. Tails 4.7 is scheduled for June 2."

- Changelog
- Release Announcement
- Security fixes

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The state of California is suing Uber and Lyft. Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a lawsuit against the two ride-hailing companies on Tuesday alleging they've "exploited hundreds of thousands of California workers" by classifying their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.

[...] The lawsuit alleges Uber and Lyft violated a California state law called AB 5, which aims to ensure workers have adequate labor protections by classifying them as employees. The suit was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by the Attorney General's Office in conjunction with the city attorneys from San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

[...] Gig workers are considered essential workers, meaning they can continue to work as the virus spreads. Because they're still out there, delivering food to people in quarantine and transporting medical workers to and from hospitals, they can be more at risk of contracting COVID-19. Thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers have been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus, according to the companies, and at least five drivers have died from the disease.

Phoenix666 writes:

Ancient river systems on Mars seen in unparalleled detail:

A high-resolution satellite has captured detailed images of a rocky Martian cliff face revealing that it was formed by rivers more than 3.7 billion years ago. That is roughly the same time that life was starting to begin on Earth.

[...] The team examined images [...] taken by NASA's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. The images were taken inside the enormous Hellas impact crater in the southern Martian hemisphere, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system.

A 200-metre-thick stack of layered rocks are visible within the cliff walls, shown in enough detail that Joel and his colleagues could be sure they are sedimentary rocks, formed by running water. The rivers would have continuously shifted their gullies, creating sandbanks.

Journal Reference:
Francesco Salese et al. "Sustained fluvial deposition recorded in Mars' Noachian stratigraphic record", Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15622-0

The presence of sedimentary rock indicates the long-term presence of water and boosts the chances that life evolved there.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AndyTheAbsurd:

Fossil fuel-free jet propulsion with air plasmas:

A team of researchers at the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University has demonstrated a prototype device that uses microwave air plasmas for jet propulsion. They describe the engine in the journal AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing.

"The motivation of our work is to help solve the global warming problems owing to humans' use of fossil fuel combustion engines to power machinery, such as cars and airplanes," said author Jau Tang, a professor at Wuhan University. "There is no need for fossil fuel with our design, and therefore, there is no carbon emission to cause greenhouse effects and global warming."

[...] The researchers created a plasma jet by compressing air into high pressures and using a microwave to ionize the pressurized air stream.

[...] The prototype plasma jet device can lift a 1-kilogram steel ball over a 24-millimeter diameter quartz tube, where the high-pressure air is converted into a plasma jet by passing through a microwave ionization chamber. To scale, the corresponding thrusting pressure is comparable to a commercial airplane jet engine.

By building a large array of these thrusters with high-power microwave sources, the prototype design can be scaled up to a full-sized jet. The authors are working on improving the efficiency of the device toward this goal.

The article, "Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere," is authored by Dan Ye, Jun Li and Jau Tang. The article will appear in AIP Advances on May 5, 2020 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0005814). After that date, it can be accessed at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0005814.

Without information about how much electrical power is used, it's impossible to say if this could be a realistic replacement for fossil-fuel jets.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new test can detect glaucoma progression 18 months earlier than the current gold standard method, according to results from a UCL-sponsored clinical trial.

The technology, supported by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, could help accelerate clinical trials, and eventually may be used in detection and diagnostics, according to the Wellcome-funded study published today in Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics.

Lead researcher Professor Francesca Cordeiro (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Imperial College London, and Western Eye Hospital Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust) said: "We have developed a quick, automated and highly sensitive way to identify which people with glaucoma are at risk of rapid progression to blindness."

martyb writes:

Elon Musk shares photo of newborn son

It looks like Elon Musk and his partner, Grimes (real name Claire Elise Boucher), are now parents to a new baby boy.

Musk announced the news on Twitter. After tweeting about something completely unrelated (EPA testing on the Tesla Model S) someone asked Musk for news on the baby. First he replied "a few hours away," then later, "Mom & baby all good."

Later, Musk confirmed the baby is a boy, and shared a picture of him holding the little guy. "A pic of you holding the baby would break the internet ... please share one," a Twitter user posted. And he obliged. He also answered a question about the baby's name, saying it's X Æ A-12 Musk, though it's not yet clear if that's the real name.

Recording artist Grimes had initially hinted at the pregnancy on Instagram, with a cryptic image featuring a baby photoshopped onto her body and later confirmed her pregnancy in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Also at The Register.

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takyon writes:

The Half-Life effect on PC-VR is the biggest Steam has ever seen

On Friday, Valve revealed the biggest jump ever in virtual reality use on its SteamVR platform: a 0.62 percent increase of all Steam users. This jump between March and April 2020, unsurprisingly, coincides with the first Steam Hardware Survey to include players of the megaton VR exclusive Half-Life: Alyx.

If that percentage tally sounds ridiculously low, remember that the last public announcement of all Steam users came in January 2019, at a count of 90 million. That number has likely grown quite a bit since then, owing to factors like free-to-play games attracting more users over that 15-month span. If we agree with estimates like Road to VR's count of roughly 141 million Steam users in April 2020 (as determined by an exponential trendline with an r-squared factor of 0.922), then that "0.62 percent increase" would mean a one-month jump of over 870,000 active VR users.

[...] These survey results could have played out differently if Valve and Oculus alike hadn't struggled to keep up with VR headset sales demand; both companies' flagship VR systems have been sold out or back-ordered at major retailers for months, particularly while anticipation for Half-Life: Alyx began mounting. As of press time, it's still impossible to buy systems from either company directly from their site and expect immediate shipment; Oculus lists nothing but "sold out" notices for all of its kits, while Valve lists a minimum wait of eight weeks for any Index-affiliated hardware.

The increase was from 1.29% of all Steam users in March to 1.91% in April.

Related: Every Classic Half-Life Game is now Free on Steam

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NASA has previously given more than $1 billion to Aerojet to "restart" production of the space shuttle era engines and a contract for six new ones. So, according to the space agency, NASA has spent $3.5 billion for a total of 24 rocket engines. That comes to $146 million per engine.

The NASA news release says that Aerojet has "implemented a plan to reduce the cost of the engines by as much as 30 percent," noting the use of more advanced manufacturing techniques.

[...] NASA designed these brilliant engines in the 1970s for the space shuttle program, during which they each flew multiple launches. A total of 46 engines were built for the shuttle at an estimated cost of $40 million[*] per engine. But now these formerly reusable engines will be flown a single time on the SLS rocket and then dropped into the ocean.

There are four engines on a Space Launch System rocket. At this price, the engines for an SLS rocket, alone, will cost more than $580 million. This does not include the costs of fabricating the rocket's large core stage, towering solid-rocket boosters, an upper stage, or the costs of test, transportation, storage, and integration. With engine prices like these, it seems reasonable to assume that the cost of a single SLS launch will remain $2 billion into perpetuity.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The area of agricultural land that will require irrigation in future could be up to four times larger than currently estimated, a new study has revealed.

Research by the University of Reading, University of Bergen and Princeton University shows the amount of land that will require human intervention to water crops by 2050 has been severely underestimated due to computer models not taking into account many uncertainties, such as population changes and availability of water.

The authors of the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, argue forecasters and policy-makers need to acknowledge multiple future scenarios in order to be prepared for potential water shortages that would have huge environmental costs.

[...] "If the amount of water needed to grow our food is much larger than calculated, this could put severe pressure on water supplies for agriculture as well as homes. These findings show we need strategies to suit a range of possible scenarios and have plans in place to cope with unexpected water shortages."

[...] The new research suggests that projections of irrigated areas made by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation and others have always underestimated the amount of irrigation required in future by basing them on other assumptions.

The study highlights that the potential global extension of irrigation might be twice, or in the most extreme scenario, even four times larger than what has been suggested by previous models.

[...] Agricultural land where crops cannot be supported by rainwater alone is often irrigated by channelling water from rivers or springs, sprinkler systems, or by controlled flooding. Increased irrigation in future would mean more water consumption, machinery, energy consumption and fertilisers, and therefore more greenhouse gas emissions.

Journal Reference
A. Puy, S. Lo Piano, A. Saltelli. Current Models Underestimate Future Irrigated Areas, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2020GL087360)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

OK, so you've air-gapped that PC. Cut the speakers. Covered the LEDs. Disconnected the monitor. Now, about the data-leaking power supply unit...

Video Israeli cyber-security side-channel expert Mordechai Guri has devised a way to pilfer data from devices that have been air-gapped and silenced.

[...] An obvious defense against acoustic data transmission is to disable any speakers on the protected device, a practice known as audio-gapping.

But Guri's latest research shows that's not enough. He and his team have found a way to turn the power supply in an isolated, muted machine into a speaker of sorts, one capable of transmitting data at a rate of 50 bits/sec.

He calls the attack POWER-SUPPLaY. The technique has the potential to be used against PC workstations and servers, as well as embedded systems and IoT devices that have no addressable audio hardware.

"We show that malware running on a PC can exploit its power supply unit (PSU) and use it as an out-of-band speaker with limited capabilities," a paper [PDF] detailing the technique explained. "The malicious code intentionally manipulates the internal switching frequency of the power supply and hence controls the waveform generated from its capacitors and transformers."

[...] Guri and others have developed a handful of similar TEMPEST attack schemes, such as luminance signaling via LCD screen fluctuations (BRIGHTNESS), acoustic signaling using fan modulation (FANSMITTER), data exfiltration via power cables (POWERHAMMER), and covert signaling via keyboard lights (CTRL-ALT-LED).

- archive.org alternate link

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Virgin Galactic's spaceship flies from its new home base for the first time:

The pieces are finally starting to come together for Virgin Galactic's space tourism — the company has flown SpaceShipTwo from Spaceport America for the first time. It was just a glide test from 50,000 feet up, but the flight let the spaceport fulfill its intended purpose and gave pilots familiarity with the New Mexico airspace. This will also help Virgin compare performance against similar maneuvers from earlier tests.

From https://www.geekwire.com/2020/virgin-galactics-spaceshiptwo-makes-first-gliding-test-flight-new-mexico/ we read:

Unity was carried to a height of 50,000 feet by its WhiteKnightTwo mothership, VMS Eve, and then released to glide back to the spaceport's runway. Virgin Galactic said Unity achieved a glide speed of Mach 0.70 and completed all test objectives with pilots Dave Mackay and CJ Sturckow at the controls. Michael Masucci and Kelly Latimer piloted Eve.

Further test flights will clear the way for passengers to start flying suborbital space trips as early as this year. More than 600 customers from 60 countries have paid as much as $250,000 for a reservation, and Virgin Galactic resumed taking deposits for trips in February.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Woman Who Sold Access to Pirated Books on Dropbox Handed Suspended Sentence:

Pirated textbooks are relatively easy to find on the open web and via dedicated pirate sites. However, some people are creating their own libraries in an effort to make money, offering online access to such material in exchange for a fee.

[...] According to the [Rights Alliance (Rettighedsalliancen)] group, which acts on behalf of a wide range of copyright holders, publishers included, routine monitoring for pirated content drew its attention to an advert placed on Den Blå Avis (The Blue Newspaper), Denmark's largest buying and selling site.

For a fee of 20 kronor (US$2.91) it offered access to 115 digital copies of books usually sold by publishers including Gyldendal, Lindhardt and Ringhof, University of Southern Denmark, and Social Literature. The books were conveniently stored on Dropbox, with customers able to download them with minimum fuss. With assistance from local police, Rights Alliance was able to have the advert quickly removed but also managed to identify the seller, a woman from the Vanløse district of Copenhagen. The group said that the woman admitted to the unlawful distribution of the content, which included books dedicated to physiotherapy.

This week her fate was decided by a court in Nykøbing Falster, which reopened for business on Monday after a closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. Following a guilty plea, the court handed down a suspended sentence of 20 days in prison accompanied by a financial confiscation order.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Frontier, amid bankruptcy, is suspected of lying about broadband expansion:

Small Internet providers have asked for a government investigation into Frontier Communications' claim that it recently deployed broadband to nearly 17,000 census blocks, saying the expansion seems unlikely given Frontier's bankruptcy and its historical failure to upgrade networks in rural areas.

The accuracy of Frontier's claimed expansion matters to other telcos because the Federal Communications Commission is planning to distribute up to $16 billion to ISPs that commit to deploying broadband in census blocks where there isn't already home Internet service with speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. An entire census block can be ruled ineligible for the $16 billion distribution under the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) even if only one or a few homes in the block have access to 25/3Mbps broadband.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Hertz Seeking to Avoid Bankruptcy After Missing Lease Payment, Report Says:

Quarantines and other recent coronavirus measures have decimated travel, both globally and domestically. Of course, this has a ripple effect on tangential industries, as well, like car rentals. As developments continue, one report claims that a car-rental giant might be facing some big financial issues.

Hertz has failed to make a lease payment and is exploring a possible bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reports [$], citing sources familiar with the matter. In a statement to Roadshow, Hertz confirmed its financial situation: "We are reducing expenses, deferring capital expenditures, and adjusting fleet levels and staffing based on the significant decline in travel demand," said a Hertz spokesperson via email. "Importantly, conversations with our lenders are ongoing and we remain in discussions with the US Treasury for support."

[...] According to the WSJ report, Hertz is currently holding $17 billion in debt, an overwhelming majority of which is attributed to car notes on its rental fleet. Hertz, like competitors such as Enterprise, have laid off staff and tried to get the money together to continue operating during these lean times.

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