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takyon writes:

AMD claims to have improved performance by about 5x while cutting power use to about 1/6th, when comparing 2014 "Kaveri" mobile APUs to 2020 "Renoir" mobile APUs. This exceeds a goal of improving efficiency by 25x by 2020:

The base value for AMD's goal is on its Kaveri mobile processors, which by the standards of today set a very low bar. As AMD moved to Carrizo, it implemented new power monitoring features on chip that allowed the system to offer a better distribution of power and ran closer to the true voltage needed, not wasting power. After Carrizo came Bristol Ridge, still based on the older cores, but used a new DDR4 controller as well as lower powered processors that were better optimized for efficiency.

A big leap came with Raven Ridge, with AMD combining its new highly efficient Zen x86 cores and Vega integrated graphics. This heralded a vast improvement in performance due to doubling the cores and improving the graphics, all within a similar power window as Bristol Ridge. This boosted up the important 25x20 metric and keeping it well above the 'linear' gain.

[...] The jump from Picasso to Renoir has been well documented. Our first use of the CPUs, reviewed in the ASUS Zephyrus G14, left us with our mouths open, almost literally. We called it a 'Mobile Revival', showcasing AMD's transition over from Zen+ to Zen2, from GF 12nm to TSMC 7nm, along with a lot of strong design and optimization on the graphics side. The changes from the 2019 to the 2020 chip include doubling the core count, from four to eight, improving the clock-for-clock performance by 15-20%, but also improving the graphics performance and frequencies despite moving down from an silicon design that had 11 compute units down to 8. This comes in line with a number of power updates, adhering to AHCI specifications, and as we discussed with Sam Naffziger, AMD Fellow, supporting the new S0ix low power states has helped tremendously. The reduction in the fabric power, along with additional memory bandwidth, offered large gains.

AMD accomplished this while using refined "7nm" Vega GPU cores in its APUs, instead of moving to a newer architecture such as RDNA2.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Google reveals major privacy shake-up, will auto-delete user data

According to a new blog post, Google will now automatically delete users’ search information, location data and voice commands after 18 months has elapsed since capture.

YouTube activity, meanwhile, will be kept on file for 36 months by default, which Google says will ensure viewers are served the most relevant content.

[...] The company’s auto-delete controls have been in place since last year, but will now be turned on by default for new users. Existing Google Account holders, though, will need to manually activate the auto-delete function from with the Activity Controls panel.

[...] The firm also took the opportunity to unveil a host of smaller changes designed to make it easier for users to access privacy controls and improve account security.

[...] Within the coming weeks, Google’s Password Checkup tool will also be integrated into the Security Checkup service, which notifies users of chinks in their security armor. The addition will allow account holders to check whether any of their login credentials have been compromised and safeguard against potential credential-stuffing attacks.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Huawei on List of 20 Chinese Companies That Pentagon Says Are Controlled by People’s Liberation Army:

The Pentagon put Huawei Technologies and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology on a list of 20 companies it says are owned or controlled by China's military, opening them up to potential additional U.S. sanctions.

In letters to lawmakers dated June 24, the Pentagon said it was providing a list of "Communist Chinese military companies operating in the United States." The list was first requested in the fiscal 1999 defense policy law.

This list includes "entities owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with China's government, military, or defense industry," Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement.

[...] The companies on the list are:

Aviation Industry Corporation of China
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation
China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation
China Electronics Technology Group Corporation
China South Industries Group Corporation
China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation
China State Shipbuilding Corporation
China North Industries Group Corporation
Huawei Technologies Co.
Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co.
Inspur Group; Aero Engine Corporation of China
China Railway Construction Corporation
CRRC Corp.; Panda Electronics Group
Dawning Information Industry Co.
China Mobile Communications Group
China General Nuclear Power Corp.
China National Nuclear Power Corp.
China Telecommunications Corp.

Given how inter-connected the world is, how practical would it be to avoid all such Chinese companies?

Original Submission

chromas writes:

New ransomware posing as COVID‑19 tracing app targets Canada; ESET offers decryptor

New ransomware CryCryptor has been targeting Android users in Canada, distributed via two websites under the guise of an official COVID-19 tracing app provided by Health Canada. ESET researchers analyzed the ransomware and created a decryption tool for the victims.

CryCryptor surfaced just a few days after the Canadian government officially announced its intention to back the development of a nation-wide, voluntary tracing app called COVID Alert. The official app is due to be rolled out for testing in the province of Ontario as soon as next month.

ESET informed the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security about this threat as soon as it was identified.

Once the user falls victim to CryCryptor, the ransomware encrypts the files on the device – all the most common types of files – but instead of locking the device, it leaves a "readme" file with the attacker's email in every directory with encrypted files.

Fortunately, we were able to create a decryption tool for those who fall victim to this ransomware.

After we spotted the tweet that brought this ransomware to our radar (the researcher who discovered it mistakenly labeled the malware as a banking trojan), we analyzed the app. We discovered a bug of the type "Improper Export of Android Components" that MITRE labels as CWE-926.

Due to this bug, any app that is installed on the affected device can launch any exported service provided by the ransomware. This allowed us to create the decryption tool – an app that launches the decrypting functionality built into the ransomware app by its creators.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Amazon creates a $2 billion climate fund, as it struggles to cut its own emissions:

Investment areas: In a press release, Amazon said the new fund would focus on startups that could help it and other businesses achieve "net zero" emissions by 2040. It will invest across a wide array of industries, including transportation, energy generation, energy storage, manufacturing, materials, and agriculture.

What's behind the move? The Seattle retail giant has come under growing pressure from the public and its own employees to shrink its environmental footprint as the dangers of global warming grow. [...]

Earlier Amazon efforts: Several days later, Amazon committed to achieve "net zero" emissions by 2040, which means it would need to offset any remaining emissions from its operations through investments in carbon removal projects, such as forest restoration or carbon capture machines. In February, chief executive Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, announced he would donate $10 billion of his personal fortune to scientists, activists, and NGOs working to address climate change.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

An experiment in recreating primordial proteins solves a long-standing riddle:

Scientists believe that the very first true proteins materialized from shorter protein segments called peptides. The peptides would have been sticky assemblies of the amino acids that were spontaneously created in the primeval chemical soup; the short peptides would have then bound to one another, over time producing a protein capable of some sort of action. The spontaneous generation of amino acids had already been demonstrated in 1952, in the famous experiment by Miller and Urey, in which they replicated the conditions thought to exist on Earth prior to life and added energy like that which could come from lightning or volcanoes. Showing amino acids could, under the right conditions, form without help from enzymes or any other mechanism in a living organism suggested that amino acids were the "egg" that preceded the enzyme "chicken."

Tawfik, who is in the Institute's Biomolecular Sciences Department, says that is all well and good, "but one vital type of amino acid has been missing from that experiment and every experiment that followed in its wake: amino acids like arginine and lysine that carry a positive electric charge." These amino acids are particularly important to modern proteins, as they interact with DNA and RNA, both of which carry net negative charges. RNA is today presumed to be the original molecule that could both carry information and make copies of itself, so contact with positively-charged amino acids would theoretically be necessary for further steps in the development of living cells to occur.

But there was one positively-charged amino acid that appeared in the Miller-Urey experiments, an amino acid called ornithine that is today found as an intermediate step in arginine production, but is not, itself, used to build proteins. The research team asked: What if ornithine was the missing amino acid in those ancestral proteins? They designed an original experiment to test this hypothesis.

Also at phys.org

Journal Reference:
Liam M. Longo, Dragana Despotović, Orit Weil-Ktorza, et al. Primordial emergence of a nucleic acid-binding protein via phase separation and statistical ornithine-to-arginine conversion [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001989117)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

This is to inform you we *are* aware of a problem with the site.

Symptom: The "Most Recent Journal Entries" box that normally appears on the right-hand-side of the main page is currently not currently displaying.

We have tried a few things, but have had no luck so far. We will update this story when we know more.

Problem first became apparent at about 17:45 UTC today.

Workaround: Use Search to look at the most recent journal entries. Specifically:

https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=&query=&author=&sort=2&op=journals

We will update this story when we know more. I have done all I (martyb) know how; hopefully TheMightyBuzzard will show up before too long and get things straightened out.

[Update-TMB]: The local mysqld instances on both web frontends both decided to be On The Crack for some reason or other. The database itself running over on the db servers was just fine and a restart of mysqld (and bouncing of Apache/Varnish which has to be done whenever mysqld is restarted) on the web frontends put things back to normal.

The cause of mysqld's drug use is unknown and shall remain so unless it happens more than once.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Virgin Galactic and NASA launch a new program to train private astronauts:

Virgin Galactic announced it has signed a deal with NASA to develop a "private orbital astronaut readiness program" that trains and supports private astronauts for missions to the International Space Station.

The background: Last year NASA announced it was accepting bids from private companies for missions to the space station, both as a tourist destination and to use its resources and the microgravity environment to run different kinds of science and tech experiments. However, it's never been quite clear exactly how these companies are supposed to train their own astronauts and provide the sort of logistical support and resources necessary to pull off a crewed mission in orbit.

The new deal: Under the new agreement, Virgin Galactic will act like something of a middleman that helps interested parties (private companies, tourists, research institutions) go to the ISS for short-duration missions. Its services will include identifying potential customers, arranging private astronaut training, procuring the launch vehicles needed to launch these customers into space, and providing on-the-ground and in-orbit support for these missions.

Also at CNET

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Facebook Loses Antitrust Decision in Germany Over Data Collection

In a decision that could further embolden European governments to take on large tech platforms, Germany's top court ruled on Tuesday that Facebook had abused its dominance in social media to illegally harvest data about its users.

[...] The case had been closely watched after German regulators used a novel interpretation of competition law to rule against the social media giant last year. The authorities said Facebook broke competition laws by combining data it collected about users across its different platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as from outside websites and third-party apps.

In Germany, Facebook now must alter how it processes data about its users. It was ordered to allow people to block the company from combining their Facebook data with information about their activities on other apps and websites.

[...] The decision may not be the last word. A lower court still must issue a ruling on the matter, a process some antitrust attorneys view as a formality given the high court's strong-worded ruling. In theory, the lower court could rule in Facebook's favor, setting up another appeal to the federal high court.

[...] Facebook said it would continue to fight and wouldn't make any immediate changes, arguing that it has months before it must comply. "We will continue to defend our position that there is no antitrust abuse," Facebook said in a statement.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

An experiment suggested by a Ph.D. student may rewrite chemistry textbooks:

The project looked at a fundamental question: Which properties are inherent to a metal and which are incidental?

[...] The scientists cooled ammonia—normally a gas at room temperature—to minus 33 C to liquify it and then added, in separate experiments, the alkali metals lithium, sodium and potassium.

In these solutions, electrons from the alkali metal initially become trapped in the gaps between ammonia molecules. This creates what scientists call 'solvated electrons,' which are highly reactive but stabilized in the ammonia. These solutions have a characteristic blue color. But given enough solvated electrons, the whole liquid turns bronze and, in essence, becomes a metal while remaining liquid.

[...] The scientists next measured the amount of energy needed to bump the solvated electrons out of metallic ammonia using an extremely bright and focused X-ray beam based in Berlin.

In a first-ever experiment, they forced different concentrations of the metallic ammonia through a microjet, which created a stream about the width of a human hair that then passed through a hair-thin X-ray beam.

The results showed that, at low concentrations, solvated electrons were more easily dislodged from the solution by the interaction with the X-rays, giving a simple energy pattern. At higher concentrations, though, the energy pattern suddenly developed a sharp band edge, indicating the solution was behaving as a metal would.

Journal Reference:
Tillmann Buttersack, Philip E. Mason, Ryan S. McMullen, et al. Photoelectron spectra of alkali metal–ammonia microjets: From blue electrolyte to bronze metal [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz7607)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

It's unconstitutional for cops to force phone unlocking, court rules:

Indiana's Supreme Court has ruled that the Fifth Amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her iPhone. The court held that the Fifth Amendment's rule against self-incrimination protected Katelin Seo from giving the police access to potentially incriminating data on her phone.

The courts are divided on how to apply the Fifth Amendment in this kind of case. Earlier this year, a Philadelphia man was released from jail after four years of being held in contempt in connection with a child-pornography case. A federal appeals court rejected his argument that the Fifth Amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock hard drives found in his possession. A Vermont federal court reached the same conclusion in 2009—as did a Colorado federal court in 2012, a Virginia state court in 2014, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2014.

But other courts in Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have reached the opposite conclusion, holding that forcing people to provide computer or smartphone passwords would violate the Fifth Amendment.

Lower courts are divided about this issue because the relevant Supreme Court precedents all predate the smartphone era. To understand the two competing theories, it's helpful to analogize the situation to a pre-digital technology.

There's much more to the matter than just the excerpt shown here -- it's well worth reading the entire article so as to not argue from ignorance.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Black hole or neutron star?

When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes; when stars that are a bit less massive than this die, they explode and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars. For decades, astronomers have been puzzled by a gap in mass that lies between neutron stars and black holes: the heaviest known neutron star is no more than 2.5 times the mass of our sun, or 2.5 solar masses, and the lightest known black hole is about 5 solar masses. The question remained: Does anything lie in this so-called mass gap?

Now, in a new study from the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector, scientists have announced the discovery of an object of 2.6 solar masses, placing it firmly in the mass gap. The object was found on Aug. 14, 2019, as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses, generating a splash of gravitational waves detected back on Earth by LIGO and Virgo. A paper about the detection is available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"We've been waiting decades to solve this mystery," said Vicky Kalogera, a professor at Northwestern University. "We don't know if this object is the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest known black hole, but either way it breaks a record."

More details: The Curious Case of GW190814: The Coalescence of a Stellar-Mass Black Hole and a Mystery Compact Object

The lighter component of the GW190814 merger could have been an intermediate object such as a quark star or Q-star.

Also at BBC.

Journal References:
GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M_⊙ Black Hole with a 2.6 M_⊙ Compact Object (open, DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab960f) (DX)

GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 Solar Mass Black Hole with a 2.6 Solar Mass Compact Object - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab960f)

LIGO-P190814-v10: GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 Msun Black Hole with a 2.6 Msun Compact Object, (DOI: https://dcc.ligo.org/P190814/public)

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Twitter terminates DDoSecrets, falsely claims it may infect visitors

Four days after leak publisher DDoSecrets circulated private documents from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the United States, Twitter has permanently suspended its account and falsely claimed that the site may infect users with malware.

[...] A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the company had permanently suspended the DDoSecrets account for violating the social media site's rules barring hacked materials. The spokesperson said the material (1) contained unredacted information that could put people at risk of real-world harm and (2) ran afoul of a policy that forbids the distribution of material that is obtained through technical breaches and hacks, as publishers of DDoSecrets claimed had been done.

DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best criticized the suspension and noted that the Twitter account for WikiLeaks remains active despite its publishing vast troves of private information resulting from the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee and members of the Hillary Clinton campaign. WikiLeaks has also tweeted links to its Vault 7 series, which published details about closely guarded CIA hacking programs.

[...] Twitter users who clicked on tweeted links to the DDoSecrets.com site received a message from Twitter warning, with no evidence, that the site may install malware, steal passwords or other sensitive data, or collect personal data for purposes of sending spam.

This security check from Web security firm Sucuri found no malware on the site, although the firm did note that it was blocked by fellow security firm McAfee.

Previously: "BlueLeaks" Exposes 269 GB of Data from Hundreds of Police Departments and "Fusion Centers"

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Evidence supports 'hot start' scenario and early ocean formation on Pluto (SD)

The accretion of new material during Pluto's formation may have generated enough heat to create a liquid ocean that has persisted beneath an icy crust to the present day, despite the dwarf planet's orbit far from the sun in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.

This "hot start" scenario, presented in a paper published June 22 in Nature Geoscience [DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0595-0] [DX], contrasts with the traditional view of Pluto's origins as a ball of frozen ice and rock in which radioactive decay could have eventually generated enough heat to melt the ice and form a subsurface ocean.

[...] The researchers calculated that if Pluto formed over a period of less that 30,000 years, then it would have started out hot. If, instead, accretion took place over a few million years, a hot start would only be possible if large impactors buried their energy deep beneath the surface.

The new findings imply that other large Kuiper belt objects probably also started out hot and could have had early oceans. These oceans could persist to the present day in the largest objects, such as the dwarf planets Eris and Makemake.

Previously:
Pluto's 'Heart' Sheds Light On Possible Buried Ocean
Subsurface Ocean Could Explain Pluto's "Heart" Feature Aligning with Charon
Pluto Has an Underground Ocean Kept Warm by a Layer of Gassy Ice

Original Submission

chromas writes:

The Original Segway Is Officially Being Retired On July 15:

When first revealed to the world back in December of 2001 Dean Kamen’s Segway promised to revolutionize urban mobility. But sticker shock, and cities quickly banning the self-balancing standing scooter, meant the Segway never came to close to realizing that dream. Nineteen years later, on July 15, the original Segway will officially roll off into the sunset.

[...] Dean Kamen, its creator, eventually sold Segway to a Beijing-based robotics startup called Ninebot back in 2015, who has continued to create and sell self-balancing ride-ons under the Segway brand, as well as scooters and other electric-powered car alternatives for getting around a crowded city where streets are often jammed with traffic.

[...] Ninebot has decided to retire the Segway PT, as well as the Segway SE-3 Patroller (a larger three-wheeled version often used by security in airports), and the Segway Robotics Mobility Platform (RMP).

The decision also results in 21 people being laid off from the company’s Bedford, New Hampshire plant, and it marks the end of one of the more ambitious and promising approaches to finally replacing gas-guzzling cars crowding big cities.

Original Submission