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An Anonymous Coward writes:

High-frequency audio could be used to stealthily track netizens

Technical folks looking to improve web privacy haven't been able to decide whether sound beyond the range of human hearing poses enough of a privacy risk to merit restriction.

People can generally hear audio frequencies ranging from 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, though individual hearing ranges vary. Audio frequencies below and above the threshold of human hearing are known as infrasound and ultrasound, respectively.

[...] A warning from America's trade watchdog, the FTC, in 2016 and research published the following year identifying 234 Android apps listening covertly for ultrasound beacons, helped discourage inaudible tracking.

Several of the companies called out for these privacy-invading practices, such as SilverPush, have moved on to other sorts of services. But the ability to craft code that communicates silently with mobile devices through inaudible sound remains a possibility, both for native apps and web apps. Computer security researchers continue to find novel ways to use inaudible audio for data exfiltration. And ultrasound is still used for legitimate operations – Google's Cast app, for example, relies on an ultrasonic token when pairing with a nearby Chromecast.

[...] Weiler raised the subject three weeks ago – one element in a larger debate about reducing the fingerprinting surface of the Web Audio API. And last week, the discussion thread was closed by Raymond Toy, a Google software engineer and co-chair of the W3C's Audio Working Group.

Toy argued that if a developer is allowed to use a specific audio sampling rate, no additional permission should be required – few users enjoy dealing with permission prompts, after all. And other web developers participating in the debate expressed concern that limiting available frequency ranges could introduce phase shifting or latency and that there's no sensible lower or upper threshold suitable for everyone.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Alien life could be growing in more places than we realised, study suggests:

Alien life could flourish in many more kinds of environment than we had previously realised, a new study has suggested.

In the new research, scientists found that microorganisms could survive and grow in an atmosphere made entirely of hydrogen. That suggests the same could be happening elsewhere in the universe, the researchers indicate, and that alien life could be growing in similar places.

Away from Earth, there are many exoplanets that are much bigger than our planet and have large amounts of hydrogen in their atmosphere. Those atmosphere tend to extend more than those that are similar to our atmosphere, meaning they are easier to see through the telescopes we use to scour the universe for alien planets.

[...] Researchers hope that if such microorganisms are growing on other planets, they may one day be detectable from Earth. They tend to produce a huge variety of gases, which could eventually become thick enough on their home planets that we would be able to spot them from across the universe, they suggest.

The discovery also shows how experiments in labs on Earth could help illuminate the search for alien life on other planets, they write in the study.

The paper, 'Laboratory studies on the viability of life in H2-dominated exoplanet atmospheres', is published in Nature Astronomy.

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canopic jug writes:

System adminsitrator Chris Siebenmann has found Modern versions of systemd can cause an unmount storm during shutdowns:

One of my discoveries about Ubuntu 20.04 is that my test machine can trigger the kernel's out of memory killing during shutdown. My test virtual machine has 4 GB of RAM and 1 GB of swap, but it also has 347 NFS[*] mounts, and after some investigation, what appears to be happening is that in the 20.04 version of systemd (systemd 245 plus whatever changes Ubuntu has made), systemd now seems to try to run umount for all of those filesystems all at once (which also starts a umount.nfs process for each one). On 20.04, this is apparently enough to OOM[**] my test machine.

[...] Unfortunately, so far I haven't found a way to control this in systemd. There appears to be no way to set limits on how many unmounts systemd will try to do at once (or in general how many units it will try to stop at once, even if that requires running programs). Nor can we readily modify the mount units, because all of our NFS mounts are done through shell scripts by directly calling mount; they don't exist in /etc/fstab or as actual .mount units.

[*] NFS: Network File System
[**] OOM Out of memory.

We've been here before and there is certainly more where that came from.

Previously:
(2020) Linux Home Directory Management is About to Undergo Major Change
(2019) System Down: A systemd-journald Exploit
(2017) Savaged by Systemd
(2017) Linux systemd Gives Root Privileges to Invalid Usernames
(2016) Systemd Crashing Bug
(2015) tmux Coders Asked to Add Special Code for systemd
(2016) SystemD Mounts EFI pseudo-fs RW, Facilitates Permanently Bricking Laptops, Closes Bug Invalid
(2015) A Technical Critique of Systemd
(2014) Devuan Developers Can Be Reached Via vua@debianfork.org
(2014) Systemd-resolved Subject to Cache Poisoning

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martyb writes:

First off, on behalf of myself and the staff here at SoylentNews, here's wishing all the Moms out there a Happy Mother's Day! (For all mine did for me, I think it should last at least a month!) [Update: apparently this is for the USA; other countries have other dates. The sentiment, however, remains the same!)

Also, I hereby express the best possible wishes for our entire community as we try to navigate a path through the COVID-19 pandemic. Take the precautions you deem necessary to protect yourself, your loved ones, and all you meet. Please be careful out there!

Should you, or someone you know, be suffering at this time — be it from COVID-19 or any other reason — I can attest to the support I received from the community when I had a health-related situation last fall. You guys (and gals!) are the best!

Folding@Home: Our Folding@Home (F@H) team keeps chugging along! Historically, the F@H effort had been geared towards understanding Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's disease, cancer and the like. People donate their unused processing power (CPUs and and video cards) to perform simulations of how proteins fold. This, in turn, helps locate a way to interfere with the progression of a disease. For the past few months, the focus has shifted to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In concert with that, there has been a huge increase in hardware donated to the cause. So, though our team rank has recently been slipping in the overall standings, I'm happy to report it's from the huge outpouring of support from around the world being brought to the cause.

Top place on our team is held by cmn3280 with just over 300 million points. Next we have LTKKane who just passed 222 million points. And not to be outdone, Runaway1956 has been running hard and is on the cusp of reaching 200 million points (and adding about 1.5 million points per day!) Pop into the #folding channel on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) or reply to this story if you'd like to join our team!

Read past the fold for info about the "Silly Season", subscriptions, site server issues, and plans.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

The Battle Between Google Engineer James Damore and Google Is Over:

More than two years later, the battle between ex-Google engineer James Damore and the company is over, although we won't know much about how it ended. Earlier this week, Damore and three other men asked a California court to dismiss the lawsuit, which claimed that the company discriminated against conservative white men. Google also joined their request for dismissal.

As part of the agreement reached with Google, first reported by Bloomberg , Damore and his fellow plaintiffs are barred from saying anything about the matter besides what's in the court filing , which is not much. Damore's lawsuit has been one of the most high-profiled fights in Silicon Valley in recent years and has made him a darling of the alt-right and conservative media.

Damore was fired from Google in 2017 after writing a memo, titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," suggesting that women are underrepresented in the tech industry because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. The memo went viral inside and outside the company.

[...] Damore proceeded to sue Google for discrimination in January 2018 . Per Bloomberg , three other men who worked for or applied for jobs at Alphabet, Google's parent company, also signed on to Damore's lawsuit. In the lawsuit , Damore's lawyers argued that he and others "were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

How Did Ancient People Keep Their Food From Rotting?:

For quarantine cuisine, many of us are reaching deep into the kitchen pantry and freezer — recovering canned soups and frozen veggies, purchased who knows when. Though we may wonder, "Are these the same peas I used to ice my sprained ankle?" we're confident the contents are edible. Perishables last for years thanks to modern methods of preservation, such as freezing, canning, vacuum-sealing and chemical additives.

But how did ancient people preserve their foods?

It's a problem that every society, from the dawn of humanity, has faced: How to save food for figurative rainy days — away from microbes, insects and other critters eager to spoil it. Over the years, archaeologists have found evidence for a variety of techniques. Some, like drying and fermenting, remain common today. Others are bygone practices, such as burying butter in peat bogs. Though low-tech, the ancient ways were effective — clearly, as some of the products have survived millennia.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Otters 'juggle' rocks and we don't know why:

A lovely, intuitive idea about why otters juggle rocks — that it helps them practice survival skills — might not be correct, new tests show.

The term "juggling" is itself overenthusiastic. Otters don't keep stones flying around in some tall, aerial circle. Instead, the animals shuffle rocks back and forth quickly between their front paws. "It's very close to the body," says animal behaviorist Mari-Lisa Allison, who studied the behavior as a graduate student at the University of Exeter in England.

Such deft fiddling looks as if it might make a great example of how animal play could serve as practice for real-life challenges. In the wild, small-clawed otters need paw dexterity to tweak shreds of seafood out of crustacean or mollusk shells. And yet, three kinds of tests found no evidence that juggling builds otters' food-picking skills^[0], Allison and her colleagues report May 6 in Royal Society Open Science.

[⁰I'm getting a 500 Internal Server Error on this link —chromas]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TurkeyWaddle:

Alphabet's Loon and AT&T will tackle global crises with internet balloons:

Alphabet's "balloon-powered internet" — Project Loon — has been active for five years now. Born of Google's X Labs, the initiative sees balloons floating 20km high in the stratosphere, beaming internet to people below. Its primary function is to bring connectivity to those affected by natural disasters, ensuring they can access the web even if traditional systems have been compromised. Today, the project has announced it has expanded globally, thanks to its ongoing partnership with AT&T.

In 2017 AT&T became the first carrier to work with the balloon-distributed wireless setup in the aftermath of Puerto Rico's Hurricane Maria. Now, that network integration has extended to AT&T's 200+ global roaming partners, too, which means Loon has the ability to serve hundreds of operators around the world without having to carry out a specific network integration, which can take weeks or even months. This means that should a disaster strike, the service will more or less be ready to go straight away, which is the ultimate goal for the project, since no-one can predict when or where a disaster will hit.

There are still some constraints, though. Loon will still need to secure government approvals, and install ground infrastructure in a given region. The company has only just started operating in Kenya, for example, after waiting years for permission. However, the company says that it already has more than 50 agreements to fly over countries or regions, and that in anticipation of the 2020 hurricane season it's begun installing infrastructure in the Caribbean region so it's ready to respond as soon as it gets the go-ahead.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Children Are Falling Ill With a Baffling Ailment Related to Covid-19:

Children Are Falling Ill With a Baffling Ailment Related to Covid-19

No children are known to have died so far, but several have ended up in intensive care with mysterious symptoms that include enlarged coronary arteries.

Jayden Hardowar, 8, from Queens, initially had only a mild fever, but eventually needed to be placed in an intensive care unit after suffering from a mysterious illness that appears to be related to the coronavirus.

One child, 8 years old, arrived at a Long Island hospital near death last week. His brother, a boy scout, had begun performing chest compressions before the ambulance crew arrived.

In the past two days alone, the hospital, Cohen Children's Medical Center, has admitted five critically ill patients — ages 4 to 12 — with an unusual sickness that appears to be somehow linked to Covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. In total, about 25 similarly ill children have been admitted there in recent weeks with symptoms ranging from reddened tongues to enlarged coronary arteries.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, most infected children have not developed serious respiratory failure of the kind that has afflicted adults. But in recent weeks, a mysterious new syndrome has cropped up among children in Long Island, New York City and other hot spots around the country, in an indication that the risk to children may be greater than anticipated.

The number of children in the United States showing signs of this new syndrome — which first was detected in Europe last month — is still small. None is known to have died, and many have responded well to treatment.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Is There a Constitutional Right to Make Robocalls?:

The Supreme Court has produced many memorable moments in its 231-year history, but today was surely the first time a toilet audibly flushed in the background during oral arguments.

Such is the reality of conducting Supreme Court business during the coronavirus pandemic. This week, for the first time ever, the Supreme Court began holding oral arguments over the phone. So it's fitting that one of the cases argued this morning was itself about phone calls.

Robocalls, to be precise. Federal law has banned automated calls to cell phones since the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, though with limited effectiveness. (At the time the ban was passed, cell phones were a novelty, and seemed to merit special protections. In the years since, of course, they have become the default for most American households.) In 2015, however, Congress added an exception for cell phone robocalls seeking to collect on debts owed to the federal government.

A bunch of political operatives and pollsters took exception to the exception. Back in May 2016, the American Association of Political Consultants, a nonpartisan trade group, sued in federal court. They argued that by carving out special treatment for federal debt collection, Congress was regulating calls differently based on the content of their message—and in doing so had violated the First Amendment.

The strange thing is that the plaintiffs don't actually want to get rid of the government debt exception. They want to knock out the whole law, to open the floodgates on robocalls—and automated texts, which the ban also covers—from campaigns, pollsters, you name it. It's a wacky bankshot legal argument: when Congress passed the debt exception in 2015, according to the plaintiffs, it retroactively invalidated a law that had been on the books since 1991. (Among the plaintiffs' bedfellows: Facebook, which filed an amicus brief in support. The company is sick of being sued for sending automated account-related text messages.)

The case, Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, is an appeal from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court ruling gave both sides something to be upset about. The court held that the federal debt exception indeed violated the First Amendment. But it agreed with the government that the rest of the law could stay in place. The immediate result was arguably a win for the rest of us: the robocall ban survived, plus it now included federal debt collection calls.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Rice University researchers have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.

The platform developed by the Brown School of Engineering lab of Rice materials scientist Jun Lou integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity. The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%.

This sort of catalysis isn't new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input.

The platform introduced by Lou, lead author and Rice postdoctoral fellow Jia Liang and their colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano is a self-sustaining producer of fuel that, they say, should be simple to produce in bulk.

"The concept is broadly similar to an artificial leaf," Lou said. "What we have is an integrated module that turns sunlight into electricity that drives an electrochemical reaction. It utilizes water and sunlight to get chemical fuels."

More information: Jia Liang et al, A Low-Cost and High-Efficiency Integrated Device toward Solar-Driven Water Splitting, ACS Nano (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b09053

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Nearly 20,000 Georgia Teens Are Issued Driver’s Licenses Without a Road Test:

Gov. Brian Kemp suspended the requirement that most Georgians pass a behind-the-wheel test when applying for licenses last month.

Like Georgia, Wisconsin also amended its procedures for issuing new driver’s licenses because of the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, Georgia waived its road-test requirement for most drivers in an effort to help fight the spread of the coronavirus. This week, the state said it had issued driver’s licenses to thousands of teenagers without one.

“There have been 19,483 teens who upgraded their permit to a provisional driver’s license with the consent of their parent or responsible adult,” Susan Sports, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Driver Services, said on Thursday.

“These teens held a permit for a year and a day and complied with all Georgia’s mandatory driver education requirements,” including 40 hours of supervised training behind the wheel, she said.

Gov. Brian Kemp suspended the road-test requirement for most Georgians applying for driver’s licenses in an April 23 executive order.

[...] Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for American teenagers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risk of motor vehicle crashes is higher among drivers ages 16 to 19 than among any other age group, the C.D.C. said, noting that drivers in that age group were three times as likely to be in a fatal crash compared with drivers 20 and older. Teenage drivers’ risk of crashing is particularly high during their first months of having a license.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Virgin birth has scientists buzzing: Researchers discover a gene in honey bees that causes virgin birth:

"It is extremely exciting," said Professor Benjamin Oldroyd in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. "Scientists have been looking for this gene for the last 30 years. Now that we know it's on chromosome 11, we have solved a mystery."

Behavioural geneticist Professor Oldroyd said: "Sex is a weird way to reproduce and yet it is the most common form of reproduction for animals and plants on the planet. It's a major biological mystery why there is so much sex going on and it doesn't make evolutionary sense. Asexuality is a much more efficient way to reproduce, and every now and then we see a species revert to it."

In the Cape honey bee, found in South Africa, the gene has allowed worker bees to lay eggs that only produce females instead of the normal males that other honey bees do. "Males are mostly useless," Professor Oldroyd said. "But Cape workers can become genetically reincarnated as a female queen and that prospect changes everything."

But it also causes problems. "Instead of being a cooperative society, Cape honey bee colonies are riven with conflict because any worker can be genetically reincarnated as the next queen. When a colony loses its queen the workers fight and compete to be the mother of the next queen," Professor Oldroyd said.

[...] Perhaps the most exciting prospect arising from this study is the possibility to understand how the gene actually works functionally. "If we could control a switch that allows animals to reproduce asexually, that would have important applications in agriculture, biotechnology and many other fields," Professor Oldroyd said. For instance, many pest ant species like fire ants are thelytokous, though unfortunately it seems to be a different gene to the one found in Capensis."

Journal Reference:

Boris Yagound, Kathleen A. Dogantzis, Amro Zayed, Julianne Lim, Paul Broekhuyse, Emily J. Remnant, Madeleine Beekman, Michael H. Allsopp, Sarah E. Aamidor, Orly Dim, Gabriele Buchmann, Benjamin P. Oldroyd. A Single Gene Causes Thelytokous Parthenogenesis, the Defining Feature of the Cape Honeybee Apis mellifera capensis. Current Biology, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.04.033

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A few weeks ago, I submitted a story about NASCAR scheduling virtual races in iRacing to provide entertainment for fans during the pandemic. NASCAR's virtual racing series ends this weekend at North Wilkesboro Speedway, a track that hasn't hosted a Cup Series race since 1996 and any racing since 2011. North Wilkesboro was one of NASCAR's oldest and most unique tracks, a 0.625 mile short track built on an incline, with an uphill backstretch and downhill frontstretch. The historic track has sat largely abandoned in rural North Carolina since NASCAR left, falling into disrepair and decay. In December, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and many other volunteers cleaned the surface of the race track to allow it to be scanned into iRacing. This 15 minute video shows North Wilkesboro Speedway was cleaned up and describes the laser scanning process used to capture the track surface for iRacing, which is why the story may be of interest for SoylentNews readers. The first race at the virtual North Wilkesboro Speedway is at 3 PM EDT and will be televised on Fox and FS1. For those who cannot watch the race on TV, NASCAR generally streams races on YouTube within a few days of the race.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

China plans to send four crewed space missions and the same number of cargo craft to complete work on its permanent space station within about two years, officials said after the launch of a newly designed spacecraft aboard the latest heavy-lift rocket.

The announcement by the country's crewed space program further cements China's aspirations to rival the U.S., Europe, Russia and private companies in outer space exploration.

The unmanned spacecraft and its return capsule were flung into space aboard a Long March 5B rocket in its debut flight Tuesday evening from the Wenchang launch center in the southern island province of Hainan.

The capsule is reportedly an improvement on the Shenzhou capsule based on the former Soviet Union's Soyuz model and can carry six astronauts rather than the current three.

China earlier launched an experimental space station that later crashed back through the atmosphere, and plans to build a larger facility with multiple modules to rival the scale of the International Space Station.

Original Submission