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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Ransomware gang is auctioning off victims' confidential data:

The Happy Blog, a dark Web site maintained by the criminals behind the ransomware known by the names REvil, Sodin, and Sodinokibi, began the online bidding process earlier on Tuesday. Previously, the group published limited details of selected victim data and threatened to air additional confidential material if the owners didn't pay. Besides stealing the data, the group also encrypts it so that it's no longer accessible to the owners.

Combining the threat of publishing the data while simultaneously locking it from its rightful owner is designed to increase the chances of a payout. The new tactic furthers the pressure, possibly because previous practices haven't yielded the desired results. The ransoms demanded are frequently high, sometimes in the millions of dollars. Affected companies have also been loath to encourage further attacks by rewarding the people behind them. Added to that reluctance are new financial pressures caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

[...] The scourge of ransomware has thrived because it provides hackers with an easily monetized crime that's payable directly by the victims (assuming they pay). The anonymity of digital currencies such as Monero also play a key role in the success and persistence of the ransomware. The new high-pressure tactic suggests that while the crime has staying power, it may still be difficult to exact payments.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo – TechCrunch:

Meet PhotoRoom, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months.

After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you're done tweaking your photo, you can save the photo and open it in another app.

"My original vision comes from my time when I was working at GoPro," co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me. "I often had to remove the background from images and when the designer was out of office, I would spend a ton of time doing it manually."

[...] Downloads really started to take off around February. PhotoRoom now has 300,000 monthly active users. The app is only available on iOS for now. And if you're a professional using it regularly, you can pay for a subscription ($9.49 per month or $46.99 per year) to remove the watermark and unlock more features.

"Subscriptions are what works best on mobile for photo and video apps," Rouif said.

[...] Like VSCO, Darkroom, PicsArt, Filmic Pro and Halide, PhotoRoom belongs to a group of prosumer apps that are tackling photo and video editing from different ways. A generation of users who grew up using visual social networks are now pushing the limits of those apps — they look simple when you first use them, but they offer a ton of depth when you learn what you can do with them. And they prove that smartphones can be great computers, beyond content consumption.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AT&T exempts HBO Max from data caps but still limits your Netflix use;:

AT&T's new HBO Max streaming service is exempt from the carrier's mobile data caps, even though competing services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ count against the monthly data limits. This news was reported today in an article by The Verge, which said that AT&T "confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company's traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans."

The traditional data caps limit customers to a certain amount of data each month before they have to pay overage fees or face extreme slowdowns for the rest of the month. "Soft data caps on unlimited plans" apparently is a reference to the 22GB or 50GB thresholds, after which unlimited-data users may be prioritized below other users when connecting to a congested cell tower.

"According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T's 'sponsored data' system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps," The Verge wrote. "But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it's just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Tic-Tac-Toe Implemented In Single Call To Printf():

[Nicholas Carlini] programmed a C implementation of two-player Tic Tac Toe, and he did it in a single call to printf(). The arguments for that single function call get mind-bendingly complex, so it may come as no surprise that it was written for The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC).

Most of us are aware that printf() is one of those functions that is considerably more complex under the hood, and capable of far more, than it may appear to be. But did you know that it is capable of Turing-complete computation?

Can't wait to see the version that can play checkers and chess!

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Get it over with, or procrastinate? New research explores our decision-making process:

New research from the UBC Sauder School of Business may have figured out why. The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, reveals key insights into how excitement, anticipation and dread factor into people's decision-making.

"This stems from the phenomenon known as 'the sign effect'," says the study's author and UBC Sauder assistant professor, David Hardisty. "A person's desire to get positive things right away is stronger than their desire to put off negative ones. However, the timing of when a person wants to handle negative things is less obvious."

Hardisty and his team found that when people look toward positive events in the future, such as an upcoming vacation, they experience pleasure, but also impatience, which makes for a mixed emotional experience.

When it comes to upcoming losses, however, the emotion tends to be all bad -- even if that root canal is far away and life at this moment is good. So rather than postpone those negative events, many prefer to get them out of the way as soon as possible.

"When you're booking a vacation, you're vicariously enjoying the vacation, which is great, but you're also contrasting it with your current situation, which is bad. So you have that mix," says Hardisty. "And for losses, it's more of a unidimensional bad feeling. When you have a dentist's appointment coming up, you don't like thinking about the pain in the dental chair."

Journal Reference
David J. Hardisty, Elke U. Weber. Impatience and Savoring vs. Dread: Asymmetries in Anticipation Explain Consumer Time Preferences for Positive vs. Negative Events, Journal of Consumer Psychology (DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1169)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New Ebola outbreak flares up as measles, COVID-19 rage in DRC:

The new Ebola outbreak is in the western city of Mbandaka, the capital of the Équateur Province. The city—situated at the junction of the Congo and Ruki Rivers—is a major trade and travel hub and home to more than 1 million people.

On Monday, June 1, 2020, officials confirmed an outbreak with six cases so far (three confirmed, three probable). Four of the cases have died, and two are being treated. The World Health Organization reported that officials expect to find more cases as outbreak responses ramp up.

The outbreak is the 11th recorded in the DRC since Ebola was discovered in the country in 1976.

Officials believe that the DRC's new outbreak is unrelated to the ongoing 10th outbreak, which began in August 2018 on the eastern side of the country—in the North Kivu, South Kivu, and Ituri provinces. That outbreak has included 3,463 cases (3,317 confirmed and 146 probable), and 2,280 people have died, making it the second-largest outbreak recorded.

[...] Meanwhile, the DRC has been battling one of the world’s largest measles outbreaks, with 369,520 cases and 6,779 deaths reported since 2019.

And as of May 31, officials have reported 3,195 cases and 72 deaths from COVID-19.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Anesthesia's effect on consciousness solved, settling century-old scientific debate:

A new study from Scripps Research published Thursday evening in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences PNAS) solves this longstanding medical mystery. Using modern nanoscale microscopic techniques, plus clever experiments in living cells and fruit flies, the scientists show how clusters of lipids in the cell membrane serve as a missing go-between in a two-part mechanism. Temporary exposure to anesthesia causes the lipid clusters to move from an ordered state, to a disordered one, and then back again, leading to a multitude of subsequent effects that ultimately cause changes in consciousness.

The discovery by chemist Richard Lerner, MD, and molecular biologist Scott Hansen, PhD, settles a century-old scientific debate, one that still simmers today: Do anesthetics act directly on cell-membrane gates called ion channels, or do they somehow act on the membrane to signal cell changes in a new and unexpected way? It has taken nearly five years of experiments, calls, debates and challenges to arrive at the conclusion that it's a two-step process that begins in the membrane, the duo say. The anesthetics perturb ordered lipid clusters within the cell membrane known as "lipid rafts" to initiate the signal.

"We think there is little doubt that this novel pathway is being used for other brain functions beyond consciousness, enabling us to now chip away at additional mysteries of the brain," Lerner says.

[...] "We think this is fundamental and foundational, but there is a lot more work that needs to be done, and it needs to be done by a lot of people," Hansen says. Lerner agrees.

"People will begin to study this for everything you can imagine: Sleep, consciousness, all those related disorders," he says. "Ether was a gift that helps us understand the problem of consciousness. It has shined a light on a heretofore unrecognized pathway that the brain has clearly evolved to control higher-order functions."

Journal Reference
Mahmud Arif Pavel, E. Nicholas Petersen, Hao Wang, et al. Studies on the mechanism of general anesthesia [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2004259117)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Breaking the mold: An unusual choice of material yields incredibly long-lasting batteries:

The tremendous increase in the use of mobile technology, wearable electronics, and a wide range of portable devices in general over the past few decades, has driven scientists worldwide to seek out the next breakthrough in rechargeable batteries. Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs)—composed of a sulfur-based cathode and lithium anode submerged in a liquid electrolyte—are promising candidates to replace the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery because of their low cost and the non-toxicity and abundance of sulfur.

However, using sulfur in batteries is tricky for two reasons. First, during the "discharge" cycle, soluble lithium polysulfides (LiPS) form at the cathode, diffuse into the electrolyte, and easily reach the anode, where they progressively degrade the capacity of the battery. Second, sulfur is non-conducting. Thus, a conductive and porous host material is required to accommodate sulfur and simultaneously trap LiPS at the cathode. In the recent past, carbon-based host structures have been explored because of their conductivity. However, carbon-based hosts cannot trap LiPS.

In a recent study published in Advanced Energy Materials, scientists from the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology proposed a novel host structure called "platelet ordered mesoporous silica (pOMS)." What is unusual about their choice is that silica, a low-cost metal oxide, is actually non-conducting. However, silica is highly polar and attracts other polar molecules such as LiPS.

[...] Yet, all this considered, perhaps the most important insight to derive from this study is that host structures for LSBs need not be as conductive as was previously thought. Prof Yu says, "Our results are surprising, as no one might have ever thought that non-conductive silica could be a highly efficient sulfur host and even outperform state-of-the-art carbon hosts." This study broadens the selection of host materials for LSBs and could lead to a paradigm shift in realizing next-generation sulfur batteries.

More information: Byong‐June Lee et al, Revisiting the Role of Conductivity and Polarity of Host Materials for Long‐Life Lithium–Sulfur Battery, Advanced Energy Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201903934

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Phoenix666 writes:

Anti-virus face masks plague Hong Kong's beaches:

Surgical masks are washing up in growing quantities on the shores of Hong Kong, a city that has overwhelmingly embraced face coverings to fight the coronavirus.

Conservationists say the masks are adding to already alarmingly high levels of plastic waste in the waters around the finance hub.

"The single use plastic mask is just another additional burden that we are leaving behind for the future generations on the beach," Gary Stokes, co-founder of OceansAsia, told AFP.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Combat drone to compete against piloted plane:

The US Air Force will pit an advanced autonomous aircraft against a piloted plane in a challenge set for July 2021.

The project could eventually lead to unpiloted fighter aircraft that use artificial intelligence (AI).

Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, head of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, called the test a "bold, bold idea".

Air Force Magazine also described the development of autonomous fighter jets as a "big Moonshot" for the military.

[...] When announced in 2018, the project envisioned the development of an unpiloted fighter jet.

Asked by Air Force Magazine whether this was still the objective, Lt Gen Shanahan said he did not know but added that AI-enabled systems could be used in other ways.

"Maybe I shouldn't be thinking about a 65ft-wingspan, maybe it is a small autonomous swarming capability," he explained.

Such swarms of drone aircraft could be deployed under a pilot's control or operate autonomously. A US military project called Skyborg will explore how the pilot of a fighter jet could control other drone aircraft - which would act as airborne sidekicks.

[Protoss] Carrier has arrived.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Ancient DNA provides new insights into the early peopling of the Caribbean:

The researchers analysed the genomes of 93 ancient Caribbean islanders who lived between 400 and 3200 years ago using bone fragments excavated by Caribbean archaeologists from 16 archaeological sites across the region.

Due to the region's warm climate, the DNA from the samples was not very well preserved. But using so-called targeted enrichment techniques, the researchers managed to extract enough information from the remains.

"These methods allowed us to increase the number of ancient genome sequences from the Caribbean by almost two orders of magnitude and with all that data we are able to paint a very detailed picture of the early migration history of the Caribbean," says Johannes Krause, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and another senior author of the study.

The researchers' findings indicate that there have been at least three different population dispersals into the region: two earlier dispersals into the western Caribbean, one of which seems to be linked to earlier population dispersals in North America, and a third, more recent "wave," which originated in South America.

Pre-Columbian maritime trade and movement may have been more robust than thought.

Journal Reference:
Kathrin Nägele, Cosimo Posth, Miren Iraeta Orbegozo, et al. Genomic insights into the early peopling of the Caribbean [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba8697)

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DannyB writes:

From Earth to orbit with Linux and SpaceX

SpaceX's Crew Dragon [...] successfully delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley into orbit. Taking them was SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, powered by rocket fuel and Linux.

Like supercomputers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and many mission-critical devices, the Falcon 9 flies with Linux. SpaceX's software engineers explained several years ago how the Falcon 9 programming works.

[...] The Falcon 9's onboard operating system is a stripped-down Linux running on three ordinary dual-core x86 processors. The flight software itself runs separately on each processor and is written in C/C++.

[...] Because the first stage of the Falcon 9 lands itself, its chips don't need to be radiation hardened.

[...] as explained on StackExchange Space Exploration, SpaceX uses an Actor-Judge system to provide safety through redundancy. In this system, every time a decision is made, it's compared to the results from the other cores. If there's any disagreement, the decision is thrown out and the process is restarted. It's only when every processor comes up with the same answer that a command is sent to the PowerPC microcontrollers.

[...] The point of this triple "tell-me three times" redundancy is to give the fault tolerance it needs without having to pay for expensive space-specific chips. Modern planes, like the newer Airbus planes, use a similar approach in their fly-by-wire systems.

The Dragon spacecraft also runs Linux with flight software written in C++. The ship's touchscreen interface is rendered using Chromium and JavaScript. If something were to go wrong with the interface, the astronauts have physical buttons to control the spacecraft.

Chromium and JavaScript are used for the Dragon 2's interactive displays -- with 100% test coverage.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The day is dawning on a four-day work week:

A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40. There are many reasons why this is appealing today: families are struggling to cover child care in the absence of daycares and schools; workplaces are trying to reduce the number of employees congregating in offices each day; and millions of people have lost their jobs.

A shorter work week could allow parents to cobble together child care, allow workplaces to stagger attendance and, theoretically, allow the available work to be divided among more people who need employment.

The most progressive shorter work week entails no salary reductions. This sounds crazy, but it rests on peer-reviewed research into shorter work weeks, which finds workers can be as productive in 30 hours as they are in 40, because they waste less time and are better-rested.

30 hours is for pikers. The !Kung work about 20.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New High Precision Chip-Based Laser Gyroscope Can Measure Earth's Rotation:

Optical gyroscopes are used in applications such as aircraft navigation systems, while MEMS gyroscopes are found in devices like smartphones. For the last few decades, researchers have wondered whether it would be possible to bridge the gap between these two technologies and create a new type of gyroscope that combines the precision of laser gyroscopes with the ease of manufacture of MEMS gyroscopes. Now, Caltech scientists have developed an optical gyroscope that marries some of the best characteristics of each into one device.

In a new paper published in Nature Photonics, Kerry Vahala (BS '80, MS '81, PhD '85), Caltech's Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Applied Physics, describes a laser gyroscope his lab built from a piece of silicon-based material in much the same way that MEMS devices are manufactured. The new type of gyroscope has achieved something considered a benchmark for gyroscopes: the ability to measure the rotation of the earth.

All optical gyroscopes, including the one developed by Vahala, make use of something known as the Sagnac effect to measure rotation. Two light waves traveling in opposite directions around a ring-like path will have equal propagation times. However, when the path rotates, the time to reach a specific point on the rotating path will be different for each wave. This difference provides a measure of the rate of rotation and can be determined very precisely by measuring the interference between the two light waves.

[...] In Vahala's gyroscope, the pathway is a circular silica disk, and the laser light is generated by high frequency vibrations in the disk through a process called stimulated Brillouin scattering.

Although the shorter light path in Vahala's gyroscope helps to keep the device smaller, it could also result in lower sensitivity. To make up for that, the light is "recycled," says Yu-Hung Lai, co-author on the paper. "The light is allowed to circulate around the path again and again, creating a stronger Sagnac effect and greater sensitivity to rotation."

Journal Reference:
Yu-Hung Lai, Myoung-Gyun Suh, Yu-Kun Lu, et al. Earth rotation measured by a chip-scale ring laser gyroscope, Nature Photonics (DOI: 10.1038/s41566-020-0588-y)

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takyon writes:

A lost Maxis "Sim" game has been discovered by an Ars reader, uploaded for all

We at Ars Technica are proud to be members of video game archiving history today. SimRefinery, one of PC gaming's most notoriously "lost" video games, now exists—as a fully playable game, albeit an unfinished one—thanks to an Ars Technica reader commenting on the story of its legend.

Two weeks ago, I reported on a story about Maxis Business Solutions, a subdivision of the game developer Maxis created in the wake of SimCity's booming success. Librarian and archivist Phil Salvador published an epic, interview-filled history of one of the game industry's earliest examples of a "serious" gaming division, which was formed as a way to cash in on major businesses' interest in using video games as work-training simulators.

[...] The anonymous Ars user returned to our comments section on Thursday to confirm that they'd uploaded the disk's contents, after an apparently annoying extraction process, to archive.org for everyone in the world to download and play.

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