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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

China is targeting a July launch for its ambitious plans for a Mars mission which will include landing a remote-controlled robot on the surface of the red planet, the company in charge of the project has said.

Beijing has invested billions of dollars in its space programme in an effort to catch up with its rival the United States and affirm its status as a major world power.

The Mars mission is among a number of new space projects China is pursuing, including putting Chinese astronauts on the moon and having a space station by 2022.

Beijing had been planning the Mars mission for sometime this year, but China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has confirmed it could come as early as July.

"This big project is progressing as planned and we are targeting a launch in July," CASC said in a statement issued on Sunday.

CASC is the main contractor for China's space programme.

Called "Tianwen", the Chinese mission will put a probe into orbit around Mars and land the robotic rover to explore and analyse the surface.

Also at:
Rocket arrives as China targets July for Tianwen-1 Mars mission launch

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Just turning your phone on qualifies as searching it, court rules:

A man from Washington state was arrested in May 2019 and was indicted on several charges related to robbery and assault. The suspect, Joseph Sam, was using an unspecified Motorola smartphone. When he was arrested, he says, one of the officers present hit the power button to bring up the phone's lock screen. The filing does not say that any officer present attempted to unlock the phone or make the suspect do so at the time.

In February 2020, the FBI also turned the phone on to take a photograph of the phone's lock screen, which displayed the name "Streezy" on it. Sam's lawyer filed a motion arguing that this evidence should not have been sought without a warrant and should therefore be suppressed.

District Judge John Coughenour of the US District Court in Seattle agreed. In his ruling, the judge determined that the police looking at the phone at the time of the arrest and the FBI looking at it again after the fact are two separate issues. Police are allowed to conduct searches without search warrant under special circumstances, Coughenour wrote, and looking at the phone's lock screen may have been permissible as it "took place either incident to a lawful arrest or as part of the police's efforts to inventory the personal effects" of the person arrested. Coughenour was unable to determine how, specifically, the police acted, and he ordered clarification to see if their search of the phone fell within those boundaries.

But where the police actions were unclear, the FBI's were both crystal clear and counter to the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights, Coughenour ruled. "Here, the FBI physically intruded on Mr. Sam's personal effect when the FBI powered on his phone to take a picture of the phone's lock screen." That qualifies as a "search" under the terms of the Fourth Amendment, he found, and since the FBI did not have a warrant for that search, it was unconstitutional.

[...] Basically, he ruled, the FBI pushing the button on the phone to activate the lock screen qualified as a search, regardless of the lock screen's nature.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

US begins crackdown on unvetted virus blood tests:

U.S. regulators are moving ahead with a crackdown on scores of antibody tests for the coronavirus that have not yet been shown to work.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday published a list of more than two dozen test makers that have failed to file applications to remain on the market or already pulled their products.

The agency said in a statement that it expects the tests "will not be marketed or distributed." It was unclear if any of the companies would face additional penalties.

Most companies faced a deadline earlier this week to file paperwork demonstrating their tests' performance. Regulators required it after previously allowing tests to launch with minimal oversight, which critics said had created a "Wild West" of unregulated testing.

[...] Under pressure to increase testing options, the FDA in March essentially allowed companies to begin selling antibody tests as long as they notified the agency of their plans and provided disclaimers, including that they were not FDA-approved.

The FDA is now working with the National Institutes of Health and other federal health agencies to vet the accuracy of the tests and determine how they can be used to track and contain the virus.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Onboard separation technology set to improve fuel economy:

A technology developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory could pave the way for increased fuel economy and lower greenhouse gas emissions as part of an octane-on-demand fuel-delivery system.

Designed to work with a car's existing fuel, the onboard separation technology is the first to use chemistry—not a physical membrane—to separate ethanol-blended gasoline into high- and low-octane fuel components. An octane-on-demand system can then meter out the appropriate fuel mixture to the engine depending on the power required: lower octane for idling, higher octane for accelerating.

Studies have shown that octane-on-demand approaches can improve fuel economy by up to 30 percent and could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent. But so far, the pervaporation membranes tested for octane on demand leave nearly 20 percent of the valuable high-octane fuel components in the gasoline.

In proof-of-concept testing with three different chemistries, PNNL's patent-pending onboard separation technology separated 95 percent of the ethanol out of commercial gasoline. The materials are also effective for separating butanol, a promising high-octane renewable fuel component.

More information: Katarzyna Grubel et al. Octane-On-Demand: Onboard Separation of Oxygenates from Gasoline, Energy & Fuels (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acs.energyfuels.8b03781

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Researchers Claim New Internet Speed Record Of 44.2 Tbps - The Verge:

Researchers based out of Australia's Monash, Swinburne, and RMIT universities say they've set a new internet speed record of 44.2 Tbps, according to a paper published in the open-access journal Nature Communications. That's theoretically enough speed to download the contents of more than 50 100GB Ultra HD Blu-ray discs in a single second.

[...] The test fiber connection ran between RMIT's Melbourne City campus and Monash University's Clayton campus, and the researchers say it mirrors infrastructure used by Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN).

[...] "What our research demonstrates is the ability for fibers that we already have in the ground, thanks to the NBN project, to be the backbone of communications networks now and in the future.

Those speeds were achieved, thanks to a piece of technology called a micro-comb, which offers a more efficient and compact way to transmit data. This micro-comb was placed within the cable's fibers in what the researchers say is the first time the technology has been used in a field trial.

Now, the researchers say the challenge is to turn the technology into something that can be used with existing infrastructure. "Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fiber links with minimal cost," RMIT's Professor Arnan Mitchell says.

Also At:
Record-breaking Aussie boffins send 44.2 terabits a second screaming down 75km of fiber from single chip

Journal Reference:
Bill Corcoran, Mengxi Tan, Xingyuan Xu, et al. Ultra-dense optical data transmission over standard fibre with a single chip source [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16265-x)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit Pushes Midair Rocket Launch to Monday:

[...] LauncherOne is Virgin's take on an orbital launch system. Rather than blasting off from the ground like SpaceX, Rocket Lab or other competitors, founder Richard Branson's concept involves attaching a small rocket to the belly of a modified 747, flying it above 75 percent of Earth's atmosphere and launching it from there.

[...] The company planned to do a full demonstration launch Sunday, May 24, but a screwy sensor prompted the team to scrub for the day "out of an abundance of caution."

The company tweeted that the issue should be resolved quickly, which would allow for the launch to still go forward during its backup window on Monday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. PT. The plan is for Cosmic Girl to take off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California and release the LauncherOne rocket over the Pacific Ocean. After a few seconds of free fall, the rocket's engine will ignite in midair for the first time and head toward low earth orbit.

[...] If Monday's demonstration launch goes well, the company will begin prepping for its first paid launch, a collaboration between NASA and universities to launch small satellites. That launch could happen as soon as June 29.

First Test Launch by Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit Postponed:

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit postponed its first space launch Sunday due to a technical problem.

aristarchus writes:

Seems like the takeover of free software continues apace, in the land of Redmond, where the Blue Screens lie.
From ZDNet,

The Windows Package Manager service and the winget.exe command-line tool are now available in public preview for everyone to test. Winget comes with the preview version of Windows App Installer for sideloading apps on Windows 10.

While Windows 10 users can install apps from the Microsoft Store, the Windows Package Manager will help developers install tools that aren't necessarily available in the store, such as Win32 software products that haven't been converted to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps in the store.

win-get? As the Operative said in "Serenity", "Bastards aren't even changing course!" Microsoft not even changing the name of the utility. At least with Stacker, they changed the name to DoubleSpace.

The tool can help users get their apps by typing 'winget install' followed by the program name into the command line or create a script that automatically installs all necessary tools.

The package manager is available to users in Microsoft's Windows Insider testing program after installing Microsoft's App Installer program.

Microsoft has aimed to create a repository of trusted applications, from which the package manager can install apps that have been vetted with its SmartScreen technology and cryptographically verified.

While the package manager does provide an alternative to the Microsoft Store, formerly the Windows Store, Microsoft says it changes nothing for the store.

What is this "store" they speak of?

The key difference between the Microsoft Store and Windows Package Manager is that the store is all about commerce while the package manager is not.

"The Windows Package Manager is a command-line interface, no marketing, no images, no commerce. Although we do plan on making those apps installable too," said Demitrius Nelon, a senior program manager at Microsoft.

Seems that they copied that from free software, specifically Debian, as well. "bash:~& sudo win-get remove --purge Windows --extreme-prejudice" Adm. Akbar says: "It's a trap!"

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Hackers infect multiple game developers with advanced malware:

One of the world’s most prolific hacking groups recently infected several Massively Multiplayer Online game makers, a feat that made it possible for the attackers to push malware-tainted apps to one target’s users and to steal in-game currencies of a second victim’s players.

Researchers from Slovakian security company ESET have tied the attacks to Winnti, a group that has been active since at least 2009 and is believed to have carried out hundreds of mostly advanced attacks.

[...] The recent attack used a never-before-seen backdoor that ESET has dubbed PipeMon. To evade security defenses, PipeMon installers bore the imprimatur of a legitimate Windows signing certificate that was stolen from Nfinity Games during a 2018 hack of that gaming developer. The backdoor—which gets its name for the multiple pipes used for one module to communicate with another and the project name of the Microsoft Visual Studio used by the developers—used the location of Windows print processors so it could survive reboots. Nfinity representatives weren't immediately available to comment.

In a post published early Thursday morning, ESET revealed little about the infected companies except to say they included several South Korea- and Taiwan-based developers of MMO games that are available on popular gaming platforms and have thousands of simultaneous players.

[...] Windows requires certificate signing before software drivers can access the kernel, which is the most security-critical part of any operating system. The certificates—which must be obtained from Windows-trusted authorities after purchasers prove they are providers of legitimate software—can also help to bypass antivirus and other end-point protections. As a result, certificates are frequent plunder in breaches.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Phys.org reports on the bold plan to take pictures of an exoplanet so sharp that oceans, continents and even clouds would be discernible.

Right now, it's impossible. From our vantage point, exoplanets—planets orbiting other stars—look like fireflies next to spotlights. In the few images we've managed to take of them, the exoplanets are mere dots. Even as the next generation of space telescopes comes online, this won't change—you'd need a 90-kilometer-wide telescope to see surface features on a planet 100 light years away.

A group of researchers has an audacious plan to overcome these difficulties. It involves using solar sail spacecraft—possibly an entire fleet of them—to fly faster and farther away from Earth than any previous space probe, turn around, and use our distant Sun's gravity as a giant magnifying glass. If it works, we'll capture an image of an exoplanet so sharp that we can see features just 10 kilometers across.

Recently awarded a $2 million grant by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, and spearheaded by JPL physicist Slava Turyshev, the project,

called the Solar Gravity Lens, or SGL, sounds like something straight out of science fiction. NASA and a collection of universities, aerospace companies and other organizations are involved, as well as Planetary Society co-founder Lou Friedman, the original solar sailing guru.

According to Turyshev

The needed technologies do already exist, but the challenge is how to make use of that technology, how to accelerate their development, and then how to best put them to use. I think we are at the beginning of an exciting period in the space industry, where getting to SGL would be practical, and scientifically exciting."

I wonder if it will come with an EF mount.

Previous Coverage
25 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Selected for 2018
Sun Could be Used as a Gravitational Lens by a Spacecraft 550 AU Away

Related
"Terrascope": Earth's Atmosphere Could be Used as a Refraction Lens for a Space Telescope

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

IBM laying off thousands, seeking “flexibility” during COVID-19 crisis:

Both Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and IBM this week announced significant cost-cutting measures, including pay cuts and significant job losses.

IBM announced its layoffs late Thursday. In a statement, the company said the "highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly remix high-value skills," which in this case means deciding you no longer place a high value on the skills a significant number of employees bring to the socially distanced table.

[...] The company's CEO, Arvind Krishna, has been with the company for decades but only stepped into the top seat in April, saying at the time he was focused on building up the parts of the company that support cloud computing and artificial intelligence and was willing to move away from the rest.

IBM did not specify how many positions were being cut, but both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News report thousands of employees were affected in five states: California, New York, North Carolina, Missouri, and Pennsylvania.

[...] IBM said in a statement it would offer subsidized medical coverage to affected employees for the next 12 months.

HPE also announced its cost-cutting plans on Thursday as part of its more recent quarterly earnings report. The company will cut some salaries through at least October 31, with executives seeing pay cuts of 20 to 25 percent.

[...] Although the company expects to conduct layoffs, company leadership did not specify which divisions or how many jobs are at stake. For now, the company said it is "working through the details in the next couple months" to determine what makes sense for the business.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Wanna force granny to take down that family photo from the internet? No problem. Europe's GDPR to the rescue:

A court in the Netherlands ruled this month that a grandmother must remove pictures of her grandchildren from her social media accounts after her daughter filed a privacy complaint.

The grandmother, according to a Gelderland District Court summary, has not been in contact with her daughter for more than a year due to a family argument.

Her daughter has three minor children who appear in pictures the grandmother posted to social media accounts on Facebook and Pinterest. In February, the daughter wrote to her mother, noting that her requests made via the police to remove the photos of her children from social media have been ignored and giving her mother until March 5 to comply or face legal action.

After the grandmother failed to take the photos down, the mother took her complaint to court.

The Dutch implementation of Europe's General Data Protection Act requires that anyone posting photos of minors obtain consent from their legal guardians.

When the court took up the matter in April, the grandmother had removed photos, except for one from Facebook. She wanted that one picture, of the grandson she had cared for from April 2012 through April 2019 while the boy and his father, separated from the mother, lived with her.

The father in the instance of the Facebook image also did not consent to the publication of the image.

[...] Accordingly, the judge gave the grandmother ten days to remove the picture. If it isn't not removed by then, a fine of €50.00 (£45, $55) will be imposed each day the images remain in place, up to a maximum of €1,000 (£900, $1,095).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Experts predict that an upcoming ruling from the EU's European Food Safety Authority, in which the sale of insect-based food products will be liberalized, could see them finally hit the mainstream.

Accordingly, interest in mass rearing systems and technologies is growing. Within the SCALIBUR project, researchers are developing a new circular economy concept whereby flies are reared on food waste from restaurants, before being processed into food, feed and other products.

[...] Of the 90 million tons of food wasted each year in the EU, about 10 comes from food services, so called HORECA (hotels, restaurants, and cafés). This is a huge amount of still quite high-value organic substances which is going to waste. The black soldier fly (BSF) naturally feeds on these kinds of organic substrates.

UNIMORE has teamed up with Italian company Kour Energy to develop a start-to-end insect rearing process to obtain valuable products (protein, lipids and chitin) in a very efficient way, using high-tech chemical fractionation. We are merging biological knowledge for the best rearing practices, with chemical expertise for a high-yield extraction of products, and design and engineering practices to develop two pilot plants able to perform the whole transformation from waste to valuable materials.

[...] In the EU it is currently not allowed to use anything that is defined as 'waste' (including, by extension, insects reared on food waste) as feed for animals.

We expect the results of SCALIBUR will prove that it is possible to use insect larvae for effective and safe biowaste conversion, and then show the relevance of the technology for industrial scale use.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On Wednesday, Intel announced its acquisition of Rivet Networks—makers of the Killer AC-brand line of gamer-oriented Wi-Fi gear—for an undisclosed price.

Intel Vice President Chris Walker describes the acquisition as "a terrific complement to our existing Wi-Fi products," going on to praise Rivet's products—the best known of which is the Killer Wireless-AC line of gaming-targeted Wi-Fi cards—and declare its intent to integrate the Killer line into Intel's broader PC Wi-Fi portfolio.

[...] Most gamers using Killer Wireless-AC products can get two potential benefits out of the stack—first, if their router and their gaming system both use Killer AC Wi-Fi interfaces, the router recognizes the Killer card in the gaming PC as a first priority and will ensure its traffic goes into the "lowest latency" bucket when shaping traffic.

Second, the Killer stack can recognize most AAA game traffic automatically and prioritize that traffic over the PC's own interface. This does nothing to alleviate congestion caused by a second device wanting to use the network—but it does, at least, allow the gamer's own PC to prioritize game traffic over Web browsing, email clients, and so forth running on the gamer's own PC.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hacker Mods Old Calculator to Access the Internet, CASIO Files DMCA Complaint

A hobbyist electronics hacker who took a cheap standard calculator and modified it to access the Internet has been hit with a DMCA copyright complaint. According to CASIO, the project uses its copyrighted source code but the developer informs TorrentFreak that his code was written entirely from scratch.

Hobbyist electronics hacker and YouTuber 'Neutrino' only has 10 videos on his channel but many are extremely popular. [...] After a not inconsiderable amount of work, Neutrino's device was able to communicate with similar devices nearby and even connect to the Internet. Pretty impressive for a supposed amateur.

As standard, the CASIO calculator chosen for the project can be picked up on eBay for just a few dollars but other components are also required, as listed on Neutrino's YouTube channel. After desoldering the solar panel and various other steps, Neutrino managed to squeeze an OLED display into the space, along with a WiFi module and other goodies.

[...] But now, just a couple of weeks after winning plenty of praise, the project has also attracted the attention of an anti-counterfeiting organization working for CASIO. REACT describes itself as a not-for-profit organization with over 30 years experience in fighting counterfeit trade. "One of our main objectives is to keep the costs of anti-counterfeiting actions affordable," its site reads. A wide range of high-profile companies are listed as members, from Apple to Yves Saint Laurent and dozens in between. This week REACT wrote to Github, where Neutrino has his 'Hack-Casio-Calculator' repository, with a demand that it should be completely taken down for infringing its client's intellectual property rights.

looorg writes:

Berlin WW2 Bombing Survivor Saturn the Alligator Dies in Moscow Zoo:

"Yesterday morning, our Mississippi alligator Saturn died of old age. He was about 84 years old - an extremely respectable age," the [Moskow Zoo] said.

Saturn was gifted to Berlin Zoo in 1936 soon after he was born in the US. He escaped the zoo being bombed in 1943.

British soldiers found him three years later and gave him to the Soviet Union.

[...] "Moscow Zoo has had the honour of keeping Saturn for 74 years," the zoo said in a statement.

"For us Saturn was an entire era, and that's without the slightest exaggeration... He saw many of us when we were children. We hope that we did not disappoint him."

[...] The zoo reported that Saturn knew his keepers, loved being massaged with a brush - and was able to crack steel feeding tongs and bits of concrete with his teeth if irritated.

Mississippi alligators usually live to 30-50 years in the wild, it added.

Saturn may even have been the world's oldest alligator - it's impossible to say. Another male alligator, Muja who is at Belgrade Zoo in Serbia, is also in his 80s and still alive.