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takyon writes:

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold

Today Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 865 had already seen tremendous success with over 140 different design wins, powering some of the best Android smartphone devices this year. We're past the hectic spring release cycle of devices, and much like last year with the S855+, for the summer and autumn release cycle, Qualcomm is providing vendors with the option for a higher-performance binned variant of the chip, the new S865+. As a bit of a[n] arbitrary, but also important characteristic of the new chip is that this is the first ever mobile silicon to finally pass the 3GHz frequency mark.

[...] Whilst in relative terms the new chipset's +10% clock improvement isn't all that earth-shattering, in absolute terms it finally allows the new Snapdragon 865+ to be the first mobile SoC to break past the 3GHz threshold, slightly exceeding that mark at a peak 3.1GHz frequency. Ever since the Cortex-A75 generation we've seen Arm make claims about their CPU microarchitectures achieving such high clock frequencies – however in all those years actual silicon products by vendors never really managed to quite get that close in commercial mass-production designs.

We've had a chat with Qualcomm's SVP and GM of mobile business Alex Katouzian, about how Qualcomm achieved this, and fundamentally it's a combination of aggressive physical design of the product as well as improving manufacturing yields during the product's lifecycle. Katouzian explained that they would have been able to achieve these frequencies on the vanilla Snapdragon 865 – but they would have had a lower quantity of products being able to meet this mark due to manufacturing variations. Yield improvements during the lifecycle of the Snapdragon 865 means that the company is able to offer this higher frequency variant now.

This feat should become more common with the arrival of Cortex-X1 ARM cores and the "5nm" and below process nodes.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

City builds open-access broadband network with Google Fiber as its first ISP:

The West Des Moines government's announcement said that "once the City installs conduit in the public right of way, broadband providers will pay a license fee to install their fiber in the City's conduit. Google Fiber will be the first tenant in the network." A conduit-license agreement "calls for Google Fiber to cover a portion of the construction cost to build conduit... through their monthly lease payments."

"On a monthly basis, Google Fiber would pay the city $2.25 for each household that connects to the network," according to the Des Moines Register. Google Fiber would pay the city a minimum of $4.5 million over 20 years.

Construction is expected to begin this fall and be completed in about two and a half years, the city said.

Related:
Google Fiber's biggest failure: ISP will turn service off in Louisville

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

FBI nabs Nigerian business scammer who allegedly cost victims millions:

The US government has gained custody of a Nigerian man who is accused of participating in a massive fraud and money laundering operation. The defendant, Ray "Hushpuppi" Abbas, has amassed 2.4 million followers on Instagram, where he flaunts his access to luxury cars, designer clothing, and private jets. The feds say that he gained this wealth by defrauding banks, law firms, and other businesses out of millions of dollars. He was arrested last month by authorities in the United Arab Emirates, where he had been living.

The FBI's criminal complaint details how the government obtained a wealth of information tying Abbas to his alleged crimes. Abbas was an avid user of American technology platforms, including Instagram, Gmail, iCloud, and Snapchat. Accounts on these platforms were all registered using a handful of common email addresses and phone numbers. Abbas's main email account—rayhushpuppi@gmail.com—included a copy of Abbas' lease at a luxury hotel in Dubai and scans of various government-issued photo IDs under Abbas' name.

Abbas is accused of participating in a number of "business email compromise" scams. By posing as trusted employees or customers of a target organization, Abbas and his fellow fraudsters allegedly tricked employees into sending large sums to bank accounts they controlled.

Original Submission

Booga1 writes:

USA Today reports Trump has Officially Begun to Withdraw the US From the World Health Organization as Pandemic Spikes:

The Trump administration has officially begun to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grip the globe and infections spike in many states across the U.S.

Congress received formal notification of the decision on Tuesday, more than a month after President Donald Trump announced his intention to end the U.S. relationship with the WHO and blasted the multilateral institution as a tool of China. The White House said the withdrawal would take effect on July 6, 2021.

[...] The formal withdrawal comes as the United States nears 3 million reported coronavirus cases and more than 130,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Globally, there have been 11.6 million cases and almost 540,000 deaths.

Additional Coverage:
Trump administration moves to formally withdraw US from WHO
Trump administration begins formal withdrawal from World Health Organization
Trump Begins Process Of U.S. Withdrawal From World Health Organization

Previously:
(2020-05-20) Trump Threatens to Take US Out of WHO Entirely and Stop All US Funding
(2020-04-15) Trump to Halt Funding to WHO

Original Submission

[20200708_160227 UTC: Update --martyb]

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1280891612088823808:

Standing down from today’s mission due to weather; proceeding through the countdown until T-1 minute for data collection. Will announce a new target launch date once confirmed on the Range

Original story follows.

martyb writes:

SpaceX will try to launch Starlink satellites with "visors" on Tuesday:

The company will seek to launch 57 Starlink satellites, along with two Earth-observation satellites for BlackSky Global, on a Falcon 9 rocket at 11:59am ET on Tuesday (15:59 UTC) from Launch Complex-39A at Kennedy Space Center. The weather looks decent, with a 60-percent chance of favorable conditions at liftoff.

[...] Because SpaceX plans to launch thousands more of these satellites as it builds out a constellation of beacons in low-Earth orbit to provide global Internet service from space, astronomers have understandably begun to raise concerns. They worry both about the night sky for backyard astronomers, as well as sophisticated observatories in Chile, Mauna Kea, and elsewhere.

SpaceX has sought to address the problem, first by darkening the satellites to make them less reflective. Now, the company is taking a bigger step, developing a radio-transparent foam that will flip out from the satellites and prevent reflection.[Picture]

"This visor lays flat on the chassis during launch and deploys during satellite separation from Falcon 9," the company stated. "The visor prevents light from reflecting off of the diffuse antennas by blocking the light from reaching the antennas altogether. Not only does this approach avoid the thermal impacts from surface darkening the antennas, but it should also have a larger impact on brightness reduction."

All of the 57 Starlink satellites on board the Falcon 9 rocket will carry these "visor" sats for the first time.

Though not explicitly stated as such, given there is no stated "launch window", I'd assume this is an instantaneous launch: it launches at the stated time or not at all. It is also unclear at this time whether there will be an attempt at fairing recovery.

The launch will be live-streamed on YouTube starting approximately 15 minutes before scheduled launch time. According to the video's description:

SpaceX is targeting Wednesday, July 8 at 11:59 a.m. EDT, 15:59 UTC, for launch of its tenth Starlink mission, which will include 57 Starlink satellites and 2 satellites from BlackSky, a Spaceflight customer. Falcon 9 will lift off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and a backup opportunity is available on Friday, July 10 at 11:16 a.m. EDT, 15:16 UTC.

Falcon 9's first stage previously supported Crew Dragon's first demonstration mission to the International Space Station, launch of the RADARSAT Constellation Mission, and the fourth and seventh Starlink missions. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9's first stage on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

Previously:
(2020-06-26) SpaceX Starlink and Rideshare Launch Friday Postponed [Updates 2]
(2020-06-13) SpaceX Targeting Starlink + Ride-Share Launch SAT June 13 at 0521 EDT (0921 UTC)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Independent reviewers offer 80 suggestions to make Starliner safer

Following the failed test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in December, NASA on Monday released the findings of an investigation into the root causes of the launch's failure and the culture that led to them.

Over the course of its review, an independent team identified 80 "recommendations" for NASA and Boeing to address before the Starliner spacecraft launches again. In addition to calling for better oversight and documentation, these recommendations stress the need for greater hardware and software integration testing. Notably, the review team called for an end-to-end test prior to each flight using the maximum amount of flight hardware available.

This is significant, because before the December test flight, Boeing did not run an integrated software test that encompassed the roughly 48-hour period from launch through docking to the station. Instead, Boeing broke the test into chunks. The first chunk ran from launch through the point at which Starliner separated from the second stage of the Atlas V booster.

Previously: Boeing's Failed Starliner Mission Strains 'Reliability' Pitch
Boeing Starliner Lands Safely in the Desert After Failing to Reach Correct Orbit
NASA Safety Panel Calls for Reviews after Second Starliner Software Problem
Boeing Acknowledges "Gaps" in its Starliner Software Testing
Boeing Hit With 61 Safety Fixes for Astronaut Capsule
Boeing to Launch Starliner Spacecraft for Second Go at Reaching the ISS after First Mission Failed

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart:

The team at security biz Gemini Advisory said a long-running criminal gang dubbed Keeper compromised hundreds of online shopping sites over the past three years to install the software nasty.

We're told 85 per cent were infected after the hackers exploited known flaws in the open-source Magento content management system (CMS) popular among e-commerce businesses and used by the sites. WordPress and Shopify were also exploited in some cases, though they were a distant second and third to Magento, each comprising only about five per cent. Magecart hides JavaScript on the web stores' payment pages so that as victims type their bank card details and other personal information into forms when buying stuff, the data is siphoned off to fraudsters to use.

[...] Companies that want to check if they are among the victims can download the list of infected domains here [PDF]. Also if you fear you've shopped at an infected site, and handed over your card details to crooks, check the list, too.

[...] Ironically, the operation was uncovered because the Keeper gang forgot to properly secure its own infrastructure. On April 24, 2019, the researchers were able to get into a poorly configured control panel the crims used to manage their infected sites. Using that panel, Gemini Advisory's team found the aforementioned cache of skimmed credit-card info.

[...] Right now, the injection-and-collection server remains active, though a Gemini Advisory spokesperson told The Register it has alerted law enforcement.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

International students will be forced to leave the U.S. or transfer to another college if their schools offer classes entirely online this fall, under new guidelines issued Monday by federal immigration authorities.

The guidelines, issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, provide additional pressure for universities to reopen even amid growing concerns about the recent spread of COVID-19 among young adults. Colleges received the guidance the same day that some institutions, including Harvard University, announced that all instruction will be offered remotely.

[...] Those attending schools that are staying online must "depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction," according to the guidance.

[...] Of particular concern is a stipulation saying students won't be exempt from the rules even if an outbreak forces their schools online during the fall term. It's unclear what would happen if a student ended up in that scenario but faced travel restrictions from their home country, said Terry Hartle, the council's senior vice president.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Trump official: Unclear if RNC can be safely held in Florida:

A top Trump administration health official says it is not clear whether it will be safe to hold the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Jacksonville next month as Florida sees record numbers of coronavirus cases.

The comments on Sunday came a month after Republican officials moved the event from North Carolina over a dispute over health precautions.

Stephen Hahn, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, also refused to confirm President Donald Trump's claim that 99 percent of coronavirus cases were harmless and called the situation a "serious problem".

With record numbers of people testing positive for the virus in Jacksonville and across Florida, Hahn was asked if it would be safe to hold the typically large RNC gathering in just seven weeks.

On Saturday, Florida reported a new record of nearly 11,500 new coronavirus cases, amid a surge in cases in western and southern states. To date, nearly 130,000 people have died in the US amid 2.83 million cases.

"I think it's too early to tell," Hahn said on CNN's State of the Union programme. "We will have to see how this unfolds in Florida and elsewhere around the country."

The Republican Party in June announced it was moving most of the convention activities to Jacksonville from Charlotte after a battle over coronavirus safety concerns with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

[...] Trump has been known to thrive on large crowds at his campaign rallies and has not embraced masks or social distancing measures at events since the country began reopening from the coronavirus shutdown.

The president has also repeatedly sought to minimise the jump in confirmed cases and claimed without evidence in a July Fourth speech that 99 percent of cases in the United States were "totally harmless".

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/toxic-hand-sanitizers-have-blinded-and-killed-adults-and-children-fda-warns/

Adults and children in the United States have been blinded, hospitalized, and, in some cases, even died after drinking hand sanitizers contaminated with the extremely toxic alcohol methanol, the Food and Drug Administration reports.

In an updated safety warning, the agency identified five more brands of hand sanitizer that contain methanol, a simple alcohol often linked to incorrectly distilled liquor that is poisonous if ingested, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin.
[...]
The newly identified products are as follows:

• Hand sanitizer Gel Unscented 70% Alcohol, made by Grupo Insoma, S.A.P.I de CV (Mexico)
• Mystic Shield Protection hand sanitizer, made by Transliquid Technologies (Mexico)
• Berish Hand Sanitizer Gel Fragrance Free, made by Soluciones Cosmeticas SA de CV (Mexico)
• Antiseptic Alcohol 70% Topical Solution hand sanitizer, made by Soluciones Cosmeticas SA de CV (Mexico)
• Britz Hand Sanitizer Ethyl Alcohol 70%, made by Tropicosmeticos SA de CV (Mexico)

The full list of product codes can be found here.

Previously:
(2020-06-23) Toxic Methanol that Causes Blindness Found in Hand Sanitizers, FDA Warns

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Targeted deep brain stimulation may improve treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder

A person with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) experiences unwanted thoughts and behaviors, the urge for which they find difficult or impossible to resist. More than 2 percent of people are affected by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors which severely impair daily activities. A treatment option for severe cases is deep brain stimulation, a technique which is also used in other disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. Deep brain stimulation involves the implantation of tiny electrodes into structures deep inside the brain. After implantation, these electrodes deliver very weak electric currents to help rebalance brain activity. By stimulating different areas of the brain, such as a fiber tract within the internal capsule or the subthalamic nucleus, this technique can help improve clinical symptoms in some cases. Treatment success depends on the accurate placement of electrodes and requires millimeter-level precision. The optimal stimulation target for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders had not previously been identified.

For the first time, a team of researchers - led by Dr. Andreas Horn of Charité's Department of Neurology with Experimental Neurology - has been able to identify a specific nerve bundle which appears to be the optimal target for stimulation. The researchers studied 50 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder who received treatment at a number of centers around the world. Using magnetic resonance imaging technology both before and after electrode placement, the researchers were able to visualize surrounding fibre tracts and test to see which of these the electrodes were selectively stimulating.

Journal Reference:
Ningfei Li, Juan Carlos Baldermann, Astrid Kibleur, et al. A unified connectomic target for deep brain stimulation in obsessive-compulsive disorder [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16734-3)

Original Submission

chromas writes:

You may be distracted by the pandemic but FYI: US Senate panel OK's backdoors-by-the-backdoor EARN IT Act

An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee – a key step in its journey to becoming law. This follows a series of changes and compromises that appear to address critics' greatest concerns while introducing fresh problems.

The draft legislation [PDF] is nominally supposed to help rid the web of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by altering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which strongly shields websites and apps, like Facebook and Twitter, from liability regardless of whatever their users share on those platforms, plus or minus some caveats. The proposed law rather ignored the fact that Section 230 already doesn't protect internet giants if their netizens upload illegal content, though.

Initial drafts of the law also contained two proposals that raised serious concerns from a broad range of groups and organizations. Firstly, the creation of a new 19-person committee that would be led by the Attorney General and dominated by law enforcement which would create content rules that tech companies would have to follow to retain legal protections. Secondly, and the suggestion that has security folks up in arms, is that those rules could require tech companies to provide Feds-only access to encrypted communications.

The idea is that companies would have to "earn" their legal shield – hence the name of the bill, EARN IT – by following the best practices created by the committee.

Following significant pushback on those points, the Judiciary Committee made changes aimed at gaining the full approval of all its members. In the now-OK'd version of the bill, the commission, called the National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, would still create its rules but it would be "voluntary" for online platforms to follow them. Instead, if tech companies did follow the commission's rules, it "would be a defense in any civil suit," said committee chair Lindsay Graham (R-SC).

Concerns over the law being used to force tech companies to introduce encryption backdoors led to an amendment [PDF], put forward by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), that stated online platforms won't face civil or criminal liability if they are unable to break end-to-end encryption in their own services.

Taken together, the amendments are intended to attract wide congressional support for the bill, and pave the way to open up Section 230. And in this instance, it worked, with the committee green-lighting the revised version by 22-0 votes on Thursday, allowing it to progress a little further toward the statute books.

However, privacy advocates and tech titans, as well as some lawmakers, remain strongly opposed to the law. For one, the proposed commission will not be made up of elected officials, and will still be able to create rules that do not need congressional approval, putting an extraordinary amount of censorship power into the hands of very few people with limited accountability.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Reddit and LinkedIn stop copying iPhone clipboards:

Reddit and LinkedIn are changing their apps to prevent them from looking at the Apple iPhone clipboard.

In a developer trial of the latest update to the phone's operating system, iOS 14, users are notified whenever an app accesses the device's copied text.

The notification exposed frequent scanning of the clipboard by apps that many users thought should not need to do so.

The two firms follow TikTok in changing their apps amid the criticism.

[...] In research published in March, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk identified dozens of apps which they said had accessed the clipboard.

At the time Apple said it did not think it was a vulnerability.

There are legitimate reasons why an app needs clipboard access - for example, in order to share a website address with a message platform, or to grab a password from a password manager and paste it into a password-protected service.

Related:
Reddit says it's fixing code in its iOS app that copied clipboard contents
Apple iOS 14 Alerts Reveal Reddit App Is Reading User Clipboard Data
Reddit promises to stop accessing user clipboards after being exposed by iOS 14

Previously:
(2020-06-28) TikTok and 53 Other iOS Apps Still Snoop Your Sensitive Clipboard Data
(2020-02-27) Apple Takes Heat Over 'Vulnerable' iOS Cut-and-Paste Data

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Astronomers See Through the Milky Way's Dust to Track Where Radiation is Coming From at the Center of the Galaxy - Universe Today

It's an astronomical peculiarity that in some ways we know more about other galaxies than we do about our own. Scientists have examined the energy coming from the center of thousands of other spiral galaxies in visible light. But for our own Milky Way, that knowledge is blocked by thick clouds of gas and dust.

A team of researchers examined decades of data from the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper telescope (WHAM) for clues about the Milky Way's energy. Their results are in a paper titled "Discovery of diffuse optical emission lines from the inner Galaxy: Evidence for LI(N)ER-like gas."

[...] There's an enormous amount of hydrogen near the center of the Milky Way. That hydrogen is ionized by the energy from the galactic center. As an ionized gas, it's had its electrons stripped away. The WHAM telescope is designed to see the ionized hydrogen, which appears red when viewed with the 'scope.

It's not just that the hydrogen is ionized. After a gas is ionized, the ions usually recombine to neutrality in a short period of time. The fact that all of this hydrogen is continually ionized by a source of energy is the link between the WHAM data and the energy at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers have thought that the source of energy for this ionization is star formation, but that's not conclusive.

WHAM is tailor-made to study ionized gas. The Milky Way contains a thick layer of it, called the Warm Ionized Medium (WIM), which is a distinct and major component of the galactic interstellar medium. The WIM is WHAM's primary target.

martyb writes:

I rolled out an improvement to the site's message processing template. =)

tl;dr:

(1) Based on a user preference, the site can send a message to inform you someone had replied to a comment you had posted. The message *now* contains links that take you directly to the *comment* instead of to the *story*. The message appears at https://soylentnews.org/my/inbox

(2) I made a mistake rolling out the change which will show up as extra text (__seclev__ 500 __version__ $Id$) below the text of the message. That was live for about an hour and is now fixed. I apologize for my error.

(3) Enjoy the added convenience!

[TMB note]:
(4) Also just added &noupdate=1 to the links to your comment and the reply so clicking on one reply won't mark every comment on the story as read anymore.
[/note]

Read on for more details, if you are curious.