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takyon writes:

ARM Faces a Boardroom Revolt as It Seeks to Remove the CEO of Its Chinese Joint Venture

ARM, the British silicon ship designer backed by SoftBank, is currently embroiled in a nail-biting boardroom conflict, equipped with an equally appropriate dramatic flareup.

To wit, ARM issued a statement on Wednesday, disclosing that the board of its Chinese joint venture – ARM China – has approved the removal of the incumbent chairman and CEO, Allen Wu. Bear in mind that the British chip designer was purchased by the Japanese behemoth, SoftBank, in 2016 for £24.3 billion. ARM currently holds a 49 percent stake in its Chinese JV, with a consortium of investors led by the Chinese equity fund, Hopu Investment, retaining the residual 51 percent stake.

However, just hours after the initial statement by ARM, its Chinese JV issued a contradictory statement on Weibo, reiterating that Allen Wu "continues to serve as its CEO" and that ARM China was operating as usual.

See also: SoftBank's Arm Says China CEO Fired for Major Irregularities

"Following a whistleblower complaint and several other current and former employee complaints, an investigation was undertaken by Arm Limited," the company said in its latest statement, jointly issued with shareholder Hopu Investment. "Evidence received from multiple sources found serious irregularities, including failing to disclose conflicts of interest and violations of the employee handbook." Wu didn't respond to emails and a message sent via his LinkedIn profile seeking comment.

SoftBank's China Chip Venture Rejects Accusations Against CEO

Also at EE Times and TechNode.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Nikola semi startup shines on Wall Street with $34BN valuation:

While Tesla's long been the poster child for stratospheric market value despite modest profits, electric truckmaker Nikola knocked on Wall Street's door this week with a huge number.

As Automotive News points out, Nikola's market value reached $34 billion this week after its debut on the New York Stock Exchange last week. The incredible value, which is higher than Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, comes with a big caveat. The startup hasn't yet posted a single dollar in revenue.

In fact, Nikola's grand plans are even lengthier than we're used to from Tesla. The massive plant Nikola plans to build in Arizona won't be fully utilized until near the end of this decade, the company has previously said. The company did announce a notable new hire on Wednesday in Mark Duchesne. The executive will become Nikola's global head of manufacturing after he spent five years at Tesla and 22 years at Toyota.

[...] With all these grand plans moving ahead, Nikola forecasts revenue in 2023 as its semis begin trickling into the world. Today, the company says it has 14,000 reservations for its fuel-cell semi trucks, which it needs to still transform into actual preorders.

Tesla has its own semi truck, the Semi, which is reportedly ready for "volume production" and scheduled for launch next year.

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looorg made a story submission which became:

HBO Max Temporarily Removes ‘Gone With the Wind’ From Library

An HBO Max spokesperson says “Gone With the Wind” will eventually return to the platform with a discussion about its historical context and a denouncement of its racist depictions.

On Tuesday, HBO Max removed the 1939 film from its library in the wake of protests over the death of George Floyd.

[...] Upon its release, “Gone With the Wind” broke theater attendance records and was the highest-grossing film of all time to that point. It still holds the record when adjusted for inflation. However, despite being considered one of the greatest films of all time, some film commentators have since criticized its depiction of slavery and Black people.

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chromas writes:

Noise disturbs the brain's compass: Identifying causes for troubles in spatial navigation:

From visual stimuli to muscle feedback and signals relayed by the vestibular system -- the human brain uses a wide range of sensory inputs to determine position and to guide us through space. An essential part of the necessary information processing happens in the "entorhinal cortex." In this area, which is present in both brain hemispheres, there are special neurons that generate a mental map of the physical environment. Thus, information on real space is translated into a "data format," which the brain can process. "The human navigation system works quite well. But it is not without flaws," explained Prof. Thomas Wolbers, principal investigator at the DZNE, Magdeburg site. "It is well known that there are people with good orientation skills and those who find it harder to find their way around. This ability usually diminishes with age, because older people generally find spatial orientation more difficult than younger individuals, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. Therefore, the chances of getting lost increase with age."

To understand the causes of this decline, DZNE scientists led by Thomas Wolbers, in collaboration with experts from the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, designed a specific experiment: A total of about 60 cognitively healthy young and older adults who were fitted with "virtual reality" goggles had to move and orient themselves -- separately from each other -- within a digitally generated environment. Simultaneously, participants also moved physically along convoluted paths. They were assisted by an experimenter who led the individual test person by the hand. In doing so, real locomotion led directly to movements in virtual space. "This is an artificial setting, but it reflects aspects of real situations," said Wolbers.

During the experiment, participants were asked several times to estimate the distance and direction to the starting point of the path. Because the virtual environment offered only a few visual cues for orientation, participants had to rely mainly on other stimuli. "We looked at how accurately participants were able to assess their position in space and thus tested what is known as path integration. In other words, the ability to determine position based on body awareness and the perception of one's own movement. Path integration is considered a central function of spatial orientation," explained Wolbers.

Journal Reference:
Matthias Stangl, Ingmar Kanitscheider, Martin Riemer, et al. Sources of path integration error in young and aging humans [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15805-9)

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aristarchus writes:

Many sources are reporting what we can read at ABC News,

NASCAR banned the Confederate flag from its races and properties on Wednesday, formally distancing itself from what for many is a symbol of slavery and racism that had been a familiar sight at stock car events for more than 70 years.

The move comes amid social unrest around the globe following the death in police custody of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in Minneapolis. Protests have roiled the nation for days and Confederate monuments are being taken down across the South — the tradtiional fan base for NASCAR.

[...] The issue was pushed to the fore this week as Bubba Wallace, NASCAR's lone black driver, called for the banishment of the Confederate flag and said there was "no place" for them in the sport. At long last, NASCAR obliged.

"The presence of the confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry," NASCAR said. "Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties."

[...] The move was announced before Wednesday night's race at Martinsville Speedway where Wallace, an Alabama native, was driving a Chevrolet with a #BlackLivesMatter paint scheme. Wallace got a shoutout on Twitter from several athletes, including NBA star LeBron James, for using the paint scheme in the race.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

GnuTLS patches huge security hole that hung around for two years – worse than Heartbleed, says Google cryptoboffin

GnuTLS, a widely used open source library implementing Transport Layer Security, last week fixed a bug that had been hiding in the code for almost two years that made resumed TLS 1.3 sessions vulnerable to attack.

The TLS handshake requires two round-trips between client and server to establish a secure connection. Session tickets provide a way to resume previously established connections with only one round-trip. But this convenience comes at a cost – it's less secure, as described by Google cryptographer Filippo Valsorda.

The flaw allowed GnuTLS servers to use session tickets issued during a previous secure TLS 1.3 session without accessing the function that generates secret keys, gnutls_session_ticket_key_generate(). An attacker capable of exploiting this vulnerability could bypass authentication under TLS 1.3 and could recover previous conversations under TLS 1.2.

The bug, introduced in GnuTLS 3.6.4 (Sep. 24, 2018), was fixed in GnuTLS 3.6.14 (June 3, 2020). [...]

- archive.org alternative

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

James Webb Space Telescope will "absolutely" not launch in March:

On Wednesday, the chief of NASA's science programs said the James Webb Space Telescope will not meet its current schedule of launching in March 2021.

"We will not launch in March," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency's associate administrator for science. "Absolutely we will not launch in March. That is not in the cards right now. That's not because they did anything wrong. It's not anyone's fault or mismanagement."

Zurbuchen made these comments at a virtual meeting of the National Academies' Space Studies Board. He said the telescope was already cutting it close on its schedule before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the agency and that the virus had led to additional lost work time.

"This team has stayed on its toes and pushed this telescope forward at the maximum speed possible," he said. "But we've lost time. Instead of two shifts fully staffed, we could not do that for all the reasons that we talk about. Not everybody was available. There were positive cases here and there. And so, perhaps, we had only one shift."

NASA and the telescope's prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, are evaluating the schedule going forward. This will include an estimate of when operations can completely return to normal—Zurbuchen said telescope preparation and testing activities are nearing full staffing again—and set a new date for a launch. This schedule review should conclude in July.

"I'm very optimistic about this thing getting off the launch pad in 2021," Zurbuchen said. "Of course, there is still a lot of mountain to climb."

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martyb writes:

Ajit Pai caves to SpaceX but is still skeptical of Musk’s latency claims:

The Federal Communications Commission has reversed course on whether to let SpaceX and other satellite providers apply for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers. But Chairman Ajit Pai said companies like SpaceX will have to prove they can offer low latencies, as the FCC does not plan to "fund untested technologies."

Pai's original proposal classified SpaceX and all other satellite operators as high-latency providers for purposes of the funding distribution, saying the companies haven't proven they can deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms. Pai's plan to shut satellite companies out of the low-latency category would have put them at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).

But SpaceX is launching low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites in altitudes ranging from 540km to 570km, a fraction of the 35,000km used with geostationary satellites, providing much lower latency than traditional satellite service. SpaceX told the FCC that its Starlink service will easily clear the 100ms cutoff, and FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly urged Pai to let LEO companies apply in the low-latency tier.

The FCC voted to approve the updated auction rules yesterday. The final order isn't public yet, but it's clear from statements by Pai and other commissioners that SpaceX and other LEO companies will be allowed to apply in the low-latency tier. The satellite companies won't gain automatic entry into the low-latency tier, but they will be given a chance to prove that they can deliver latencies below 100ms.

[...] SpaceX met with commission staff over the last few days of May, telling them that its broadband system "easily clears the commission's 100ms threshold for low-latency services, even including its 'processing time' during unrealistic worst-case scenarios." We contacted SpaceX today about the low-latency change and will update this story if we get a response.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Ice, ice, maybe: Neutrino anomalies in Antarctica explained by physics' Ian Shoemaker:

A new research paper co-authored by a Virginia Tech assistant professor of physics provides a new explanation for two recent strange events that occurred in Antarctica – high-energy neutrinos appearing to come up out of the Earth on their own accord and head skyward.

The anomalies occurred in 2016 and 2018 and were discovered by scientists searching for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos coming from space, all tracked by an array of radio antennas attached to a balloon floating roughly 23 miles above the South Pole. Neutrinos are exceedingly small particles, created in a number of ways, including exploding stars and gamma ray bursts. They are everywhere within the universe and are tiny enough to pass through just about any object, from people to lead to buildings and the Earth itself.

[...] Ian Shoemaker, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Center for Neutrino Physics, both part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, has a different, simpler explanation. In a recent paper published in the journal Annals of Glaciology, Shoemaker and several colleagues posit that the anomalies are not from neutrinos, but are merely unflipped reflections of the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays that arrive from space — miss the top layer ice — then enter the ground, striking deep, compacted snow known as firn.

[...] Shoemaker added that, "When cosmic rays, or neutrinos, go through ice at very high energies, they scatter on materials inside the ice, on protons and electrons, and they can make a burst of radio, a big nice radio signal that scientists can see. The problem is that these signals have the radio pulse characteristic of a neutrino, but [appear] to be traversing vastly more than is possible given known physics. Ordinary neutrinos just don't [do] this. But cosmic rays at these energies are common occurrences and have been seen by many, many experiments."

Journal Reference:
Ian M. Shoemaker, Alexander Kusenko, Peter Kuipers Munneke, et al. Reflections on the anomalous ANITA events: the Antarctic subsurface as a possible explanation [open], Annals of Glaciology (DOI: 10.1017/aog.2020.19)

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rob_on_earth writes:

This is fascinating look at a crime scene recreated with Blender¹ (and other tools) from publicly available information.

https://www.blendernation.com/2020/06/10/forensic-reconstruction-the-killing-of-mark-duggan/:

View the interactive feature on the Guardian here.

Click here to explore the scene in a virtual reality 360° video.

Read about our investigation in depth in our methodology report.

Read our letter to the Independent Office of Police Conduct.

[...] On 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot to death by police in Tottenham, north London, after undercover officers forced the minicab in which he was travelling to pull over.

As the vehicle came to a stop, Duggan opened the rear door, and leapt out. Within seconds, an advancing officer known only by his codename, V53, had fired twice. The first shot passed through Duggan's arm, and struck a second officer, known as W42, in his underarm radio. The second, fatal shot hit Duggan in his chest.

V53 would later tell investigators that he saw a gun in Duggan's hand, and felt his life to be in danger. Duggan was being monitored by Operation Trident, a controversial unit of the Metropolitan Police focused on gun crime in London's black communities; firearms officers had followed him from a nearby meeting, at which he had reportedly collected a gun. But following the shooting, the gun in question was found around seven metres away from where Duggan had been shot, on a nearby patch of grass. But no officers reported that they saw Duggan throw the gun, or make any kind of throwing motion.

¹Blender is a free and open source 3D modelling, animation and rendering solution, that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New Zealand lifts lockdown as last coronavirus patient recovers:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced New Zealand will lift its coronavirus lockdown allowing a return to a nearly normal life for the country's five million people, as health officials reported that the final person known to have contracted the infection had recovered.

Making the announcement at a news conference on Monday, Ardern said the government would not let down its guard over the virus and promised to rebuild an economy that has slowed because of the global pandemic.

[...] It has been 17 days since the last new case was reported in New Zealand, and Monday also marked the first time since late February that there have been no active cases.

[...] Officials were eager to stress that the coronavirus remained a concern given the growth of cases elsewhere in the world. Borders would remain closed, Ardern said, describing them as the "first line of defence". Only citizens and residents, with some exceptions, are currently allowed into the country.

[...] Elimination did not mean eradicating the virus permanently from New Zealand, but eliminating "chains of transmission" for at least 28 consecutive days after the last infected person left isolation, which would be on June 15, the ministry said.

[...] Experts say a number of factors have helped the nation wipe out the disease, including its isolated location, along with leadership shown by the prime minister, who imposed a strict lockdown early on during the outbreak.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Galactic flash points to long-sought source for enigmatic radio bursts:

On 28 April, as Earth's rotation swept a Canadian radio telescope across the sky, it watched for mysterious milliseconds long flashes called fast radio bursts (FRBs). At 7:34 a.m. local time an enormous one appeared, but awkwardly, in the peripheral vision of the scope. "It was way off the edge of the telescope," says Paul Scholz, an astronomer at the University of Toronto and a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). Because of its brightness, the team knew its source was nearby. All other FRBs seen so far have erupted in distant galaxies—too far and too fast to figure out what produced them.

The team had a hunch about this one. In previous days, orbiting telescopes had witnessed a Milky Way magnetar—a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field—flinging out bursts of x-rays and gamma rays. The turmoil suggested it might be pulsing with radio waves, too. After some extra data processing, the team determined the FRB was "definitely colocated" with the magnetar, Scholz says. "We were really excited."

The find, announced in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server on 20 May, could be the missing link in a problem that has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade. It's only a single event and many questions remain, including why this burst was 30 times less energetic than the weakest FRB traced to another galaxy. Yet astronomers are increasingly confident that some, if not all, of these laserlike radio flashes originate from magnetars, collapsed stars with magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than any magnet made on Earth. A magnetar origin would rule out more exotic sources such as supermassive black holes and merging neutron stars. "The game of alternative theories is becoming more and more difficult," says theorist Maxim Lyutikov of Purdue University. "For the majority, it's a decided question: It's magnetars."

The first FRB was detected in 2007, and astronomers have tallied a little over 100 since then. Their brevity makes them hard to study or trace to a particular celestial object. But several FRBs have been found to repeat, giving astronomers a chance to identify their host galaxy. And in the past year or two, wide-field telescopes such as CHIME, designed to survey large swaths of the sky, have begun to boost the number of detections substantially.

More: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.06223 [PDF]

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The arrival of the novel coronavirus and subsequent shutdowns of economies across the globe have caused hardships not seen in generations. But for business professors, it's also a once-in-a-generation research opportunity.

USC Marshall Assistant Professor of Marketing and Kenneth King Stonier Assistant Professor of Business Administration Davide Proserpio was one of the first academics to study the sharing economy as he completed his Ph.D. Today he is considered a leading expert in the so-called "gig" economy. We asked him five questions about how the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant shutdown are affecting the sector.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The APT known as TA410 has added a modular remote-access trojan (RAT) to its espionage arsenal, deployed against Windows targets in the United States’ utilities sector.

According to researchers at Proofpoint, the RAT, called FlowCloud, can access installed applications and control the keyboard, mouse, screen, files, services and processes of an infected computer, with the ability to exfiltrate information to a command-and-control (C2) provider. It appears to be related to previous attacks delivering the LookBack malware.

The RAT first scurried onto the scene last summer as part of a spear-phishing campaign. Utility providers received training- and certification-related emails with subject lines such as “PowerSafe energy educational courses (30-days trial),” containing portable executable (PE) attachments, according to a Monday Proofpoint analysis.

To make the effort more convincing, the threat actor-controlled domains that delivered the emails impersonated energy-sector training services, and used subdomains which contained the word “engineer.”

[APT - Advanced Persistent Threat]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Senator fears Clearview AI facial recognition could be used on protesters:

Sen. Edward Markey has raised concerns that police and law enforcement agencies have access to controversial facial recognition app Clearview AI in cities where people are protesting the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died two weeks ago while in the custody of Minneapolis police.

[...] "As demonstrators across the country exercise their First Amendment rights by protesting racial injustice, it is important that law enforcement does not use technological tools to stifle free speech or endanger the public," Markey said in a letter to Clearview AI CEO and co-founder Hoan Ton-That.

The threat of surveillance could also deter people from "speaking out against injustice for fear of being permanently included in law enforcement databases," he said.

Markey, who has previously hammered Clearview AI over its sales to foreign governments, use by domestic law enforcement and use in the COVID-19 pandemic, is now asking the company for a list of law enforcement agencies that have signed new contracts since May 25, 2020.

It's also being asked if search traffic on its database has increased during the past two weeks; whether it considers a law enforcement agency's "history of unlawful or discriminatory policing practices" before selling the technology to them; what process it takes to give away free trials; and whether it will prohibit its technology from being used to identify peaceful protestors.

[...] Ton-That said he will respond to the letter from Markey. "Clearview AI's technology is intended only for after-the-crime investigations, and not as a surveillance tool relating to protests or under any other circumstances," he said in an emailed statement.

Previously: