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takyon writes:

Nvidia overtakes Intel as most valuable U.S. chipmaker

Nvidia has for the first time overtaken Intel as the most valuable U.S. chipmaker.

In a semiconductor industry milestone, Nvidia's shares rose 2.3% in afternoon trading on Wednesday to a record $404, putting the graphic component maker's market capitalization at $248 billion, just above the $246 billion value of Intel, once the world's leading chipmaker.

[...] Despite Nvidia's meteoric stock rise, its sales remain a fraction of Intel's. Analysts on average see Nvidia's revenue rising 34% in its current fiscal year to $14.6 billion, while they expect Intel's 2020 revenue to increase 2.5% to $73.8 billion, according to Refinitiv.

Reflecting investors' optimism about Nvidia's future profit growth, its shares are currently trading at 45 times expected earnings, while Intel's trade at 12 times expected earnings.

TSMC and Samsung are more valuable than Nvidia.

In other news, Elon Musk is worth more than Warren Buffet.

Also at EE Times.

See also: Where did it all go wrong for Intel?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Digicert will shovel some 50,000 EV HTTPS certificates into the furnace this Saturday after audit bungle:

Digicert says, come Saturday, July 11, it will revoke tens of thousands of encryption certificates issued by intermediaries that were not properly audited.

A notice emitted by the certificate biz explained that a number of its intermediate certificate authorities (ICAs) had issued EV certs to customers despite not being included in DigiCert's WebTrust audits – which goes against the rules for EV certs. To remedy this, DigiCert said it will revoke every single EV cert issued by the ICAs in question – think CertCentral, Symantec, Thawte, and GeoTrust.

"To resolve the issue, we must migrate issuance to new ICAs and revoke all certificates issued under the impacted ICAs," Digicert told its customers in an email.

"Although there is no security threat, the EV Guidelines require that we revoke EV certificates signed by the affected ICAs by July 11, 2020 at 12pm MDT (July 11, 18:00 UTC)."

[...] And, by the way, EV certs, aka Extended Validation certificates, are supposed to be the gold standard in the cert-selling industry: these are the ones that show up with the cert owner's legal name in some browsers' address bar next to the padlock. This is so that when you're visiting your bank's website, and it says My Super Bank Corp, you're reassured this really is the real deal. EV certs have their critics.

[...] "Revoking over 50,000 certificates within five days is a draconian move that is only warranted when a severe security breach has been detected," wrote Bugzilla user Hank Nussbacher. "There needs to be some common sense in determining how long to allow before the certificate is revoked. Minor typos in province or mistakes with audit reports should be given 2-4 weeks to revoke certificates."

As others point out, however, it isn't Digicert's call to only wait five days for the revocation. Rather, that is what is required by Mozilla and CAB Forum rules.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Scientists propose plan to determine if Planet Nine is a primordial black hole:

Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, and Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student, have developed the new method to search for black holes in the outer solar system based on flares that result from the disruption of intercepted comets. The study suggests that the LSST[*] has the capability to find black holes by observing for accretion flares resulting from the impact of small Oort cloud objects.

"In the vicinity of a black hole, small bodies that approach it will melt as a result of heating from the background accretion of gas from the interstellar medium onto the black hole," said Siraj. "Once they melt, the small bodies are subject to tidal disruption by the black hole, followed by accretion from the tidally disrupted body onto the black hole." Loeb added, "Because black holes are intrinsically dark, the radiation that matter emits on its way to the mouth of the black hole is our only way to illuminate this dark environment."

[...] The upcoming LSST is expected to have the sensitivity required to detect accretion flares, while current technology isn't able to do so without guidance. "LSST has a wide field of view, covering the entire sky again and again, and searching for transient flares," said Loeb. "Other telescopes are good at pointing at a known target, but we do not know exactly where to look for Planet Nine. We only know the broad region in which it may reside." Siraj added, "LSST's ability to survey the sky twice per week is extremely valuable. In addition, its unprecedented depth will allow for the detection of flares resulting from relatively small impactors, which are more frequent than large ones."

Cops Seize Server That Hosted BlueLeaks, DDoSecrets Says

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Cops Seize Server that Hosted BlueLeaks, DDoSecrets Says:

Authorities in Germany have seized a server used by the organization that published a trove of US police internal documents commonly known as BlueLeaks, according to the organization's founder.

On Tuesday, Emma Best, the founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets or DDoSecrets, a WikiLeaks-like website that has published the police data, said that prosecutors in the German town of Zwickau seized the organization's "primary public download server."

"We are working to obtain additional information, but presume it is [regarding] #BlueLeaks," Best added on Twitter. "The server was used ONLY to distribute data to the public. It had no contact with sources and was involved in nothing more than enlightening the public through journalistic publishing."

Best shared a screenshot of the email they received from DDoSecrets' hosting provider informing of the server seizure.

"Your server has been confiscated," the email reads. "Until now we were not allowed to inform you accordingly." The email then notes that the seizing authority was the Department of Public Prosecution Zwickau.

German Authorities Seized the Servers that Hosted BlueLeaks Police Files at the Request of the US Government

takyon writes:

German authorities seized the servers that hosted BlueLeaks police files at the request of the US government:

The site that hosted hundreds of thousands of leaked police files — dubbed BlueLeaks — has been taken offline after its servers were confiscated by German authorities acting at the request of the US government.

[...] It's not clear what legal grounds the US has to take the server offline. Hacking the government is a crime, but the Supreme Court has upheld the right of journalists to publish leaked documents as long as they weren't involved in their theft. DDoSecrets maintains that it's a publisher without any ties to the hacker who first obtained the BlueLeaks files.

A spokesperson for the Zwickau prosecutor's office told the German outlet Zeit Online [in German] that they were aware DDoSecrets is a journalistic project, but declined to provide any further information.

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

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Libtorrent Adds WebTorrent Support, Expanding the Reach of Browser Torrenting

Libtorrent has bridged the gap between WebTorrent and traditional torrent clients. The open-source BitTorrent library, used by clients including Deluge, qBittorrent, and Tribler, will help to widely expand the reach of browser-based WebTorrent tools and services.

[...] Over the past few years, several tools and services have been built on WebTorrent's technology. These include Instant.io, βTorrent, as well as the popular Brave browser, which comes with a built-in torrent client based on WebTorrent. These apps and services all work as advertised. However, WebTorrent-based implementations typically come with a major drawback. Since communication between WebTorrent peers relies on WebRTC, it can't share files with standard torrent clients by default.

This rift between WebTorrent and traditional torrent clients is now starting to close. Libtorrent has just created a bridge between the two 'worlds' by implementing official WebTorrent support.

[...] Right now, WebTorrent and traditional torrent clients can't talk to each other. However, the libtorrent peers will soon act as a hybrid, bridging the gap between these two ecosystems.

WebTorrent support #4123

Previously: WebTorrent, a BitTorrent Client Running Within the Web Browser

Original Submission

[20200711_145309 UTC. Update]:

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1281942134736617472

Standing down from today's launch of the tenth Starlink mission to allow more time for checkouts; team is working to identify the next launch opportunity. Will announce a new target date once confirmed with the Range

martyb writes:

[Ed note: based on community feedback, this story is not in the normal story cadence; no story was displaced to fit this into today's story schedule. It is listed more as an announcement that a launch is coming for those who might want to watch it and would not know otherwise. Also, this is Rocket Science™ so there is a possibility things might go boom. --martyb]

According to Spaceflight Now SpaceX is going to make another attempt at a Starlink 9/BlackSky Global launch today (90 minutes from when this story goes live) at 1054 EDT (1454 UTC):

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The new study, published July 9, 2020 in Science, showed that after mice exercise, their livers secrete a protein called Gpld1 into the blood. Levels of this protein in the blood correspond to improved cognitive function in aged mice, and a collaboration with the UCSF Memory and Aging Center found that the enzyme is also elevated in the blood of elderly humans who exercise regularly. But the researchers showed that simply increasing the amount of Gpld1 produced by the mouse liver could confer many of the same brain benefits as regular exercise.

[...] Villeda lab graduate student Alana Horowitz and postdoctoral researcher Xuelai Fan, PhD, [pursued] blood-borne factors that might also confer the benefits of exercise, which is also known to rejuvenate the aging brain in a similar fashion to what was seen in the lab's "young blood" experiments.

Horowitz and Fan took blood from aged mice who had exercised regularly for seven weeks and administered it to sedentary aged mice. They found that four weeks of this treatment produced dramatic improvements in learning and memory in the older mice, similar to what was seen in the mice who had exercised regularly. When they examined the animals' brains, they found evidence of enhanced production of new neurons in the region known as the hippocampus, a well-documented proxy for the rejuvenating benefits of exercise.

martyb writes:

Detection of electrical signaling between tomato plants raises interesting questions:

UAH's [University of Alabama in Huntsville] Dr. Yuri Shtessel and Dr. Alexander Volkov, a professor of biochemistry at Oakwood University, coauthored a paper that used physical experiments and mathematical modeling to study transmission of electrical signals between tomato plants.

[...] "Dr. Volkov is a prominent scholar in biochemistry. Once, we were talking about the electrical signal propagation though the plant's stem and between the plants—plant communication—through the soil," Dr. Shtessel says. "I suggested building an equivalent electrical circuit and a corresponding mathematical model that describes these processes."

The mathematical modeling is based on ordinary and partial differential equations. Dr. Shtessel was in charge of building the models, running the simulations and generating the plots.

[...] Plants generate electric signals that propagate through their parts. When the roots of tomatoes are experimentally isolated from each other with an air gap, the electrical impedance of the gap is very large.

"The electrical signals won't go through this gap," Dr. Shtessel says. In that experiment, communication between plants via their roots was prevented, as was discovered by Dr. Volkov.

However, when the plants are living in common soil, experiments conducted by Dr. Volkov found that the ground impedance is not very large and they can communicate by passing electrical signals to each other through the Mycorrhizal network in the soil.

Maybe there is something to the "Tree of Souls" in Avatar?

Journal Reference:
Alexander G. Volkov et al. Underground electrotonic signal transmission between plants [open], Communicative & Integrative Biology (2020). (DOI: 10.1080/19420889.2020.1757207)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Unreal’s new iPhone app does live motion capture with Face ID sensors:

Unreal Engine developer Epic Games has released Live Link Face, an iPhone app that uses the front-facing 3D sensors in the phone to do live motion capture for facial animations in 3D projects like video games, animations, or films.

The app uses tools from Apple's ARKit framework and the iPhone's TrueDepth sensor array to stream live motion capture from an actor looking at the phone to 3D characters in Unreal Engine running on a nearby workstation. It captures facial expressions as well as head and neck rotation.

Live Link Face can stream to multiple machines at once, and "robust timecode support and precise frame accuracy enable seamless synchronization with other stage components like cameras and body motion capture," according to Epic's blog post announcing the app. Users get a CSV of raw blendshape data and an MOV from the phone's front-facing video camera, with timecodes.

[...] For those not familiar, Unreal Engine began life as a graphics engine used by triple-A video game studios for titles like Gears of War and Mass Effect, and it has evolved over time to be used by indies and in other situations like filmmaking, architecture, and design. It competes with another popular engine called Unity, as well as in-house tools developed by various studios.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Millennials drive for 8% fewer trips than older generations:

we surveyed 2,225 American adults of all ages. On average millennials drive for 8% fewer of their typical weekly trips than baby boomers or Gen Xers.

Moreover, this difference does not disappear when we control for demographic information, proving that millennial behavior is not just about being young, single and low-income. Instead, what distinguishes millennials are their attitudes.

Millennials are more pro-environment than previous generations and less likely to believe driving gives them independence. They also see driving as more dangerous and want a travel mode that offers side benefits such as exercise or the ability to read or use social media.

The generational difference has profound implications for auto manufacturers.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Hacking Ventilators With DIY Dongles From Poland:

As COVID-19 surges, hospitals and independent biomedical technicians have turned to a global grey-market for hardware and software to circumvent manufacturer repair locks and keep life-saving ventilators running.

The dongle is handmade, little more than a circuit board encased in plastic with two connectors. One side goes to a ventilator’s patient monitor, another goes to the breath delivery unit. A third cable connects to a computer.

This little dongle—shipped to him by a hacker in Poland—has helped William repair at least 70 broken Puritan Bennett 840 ventilators that he’s bought on eBay and from other secondhand websites. He has sold these refurbished ventilators to hospitals and governments throughout the United States, to help them handle an influx of COVID-19 patients. Motherboard agreed to speak to William anonymously because he was not authorized by his company to talk to the media, but Motherboard verified the specifics of his story with photos and other biomedical technicians.

William is essentially Frankensteining together two broken machines to make one functioning machine. Some of the most common repairs he does on the PB840, made by a company called Medtronic, is replacing broken monitors with new ones. The issue is that, like so many other electronics, medical equipment, including ventilators, increasingly has software that prevents “unauthorized” people from repairing or refurbishing broken devices, and Medtronic will not help him fix them.

[...] Delays in getting equipment running put patients at risk. In the meantime, biomedical technicians will continue to try to make-do with what they can. “If someone has a ventilator and the technology to [update the software], more power to them,” Mackeil said. “Some might say you’re violating copyright, but if you own the machine, who’s to say they couldn’t or they shouldn’t?”

I understand that there is an ongoing debate on the "right to repair". However, many manufacturers increasingly find ways to ensure that "unauthorised" people cannot repair their devices. Where do you stand on this issue? During the ongoing pandemic, do medical device manufacturers have the right to prevent repair by third parties?

canopic jug writes:

Bunnie Huang has published a reference design for a near-ultrasound data link.

We were requested to investigate “near ultrasound” (NUS) links as part of our research on developing the Simmel reference design for a privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing device. After a month of poking at it, the TL;DR is that, as suspected, the physics of NUS is not conducive to reliable contact tracing. While BLE has the problem that you have too many false positive contacts, NUS has the problem of too many false negatives: pockets, purses, and your own body can effectively block the signal.

That being said, we did develop a pretty decent-performing NUS data link, so we’ve packed up what we did into an open source reference design that you can clone and use in your own projects.

Previously:
(2020) Your Apps Can Pick Up Ultrasonic Signals You Can't Hear
(2017) Ultrasound Tracking Could be Used to Deanonymize Tor Users

Original Submission

martyb writes:

A complex gene program initiates brain changes in response to cocaine:

The lab of Jeremy Day, Ph.D., at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has used single-nucleus RNA sequencing approaches to compare transcriptional responses to acute cocaine in 16 unique cell populations from a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, or NAc. This molecular atlas is “a previously unachieved level of cellular resolution for cocaine-mediated gene regulation in this region,” said Day, an associate professor in the UAB Department of Neurobiology.

The atlas was just the beginning of a major study, published in the journal Science Advances, that used multiple cutting-edge technologies to describe a dopamine-induced gene expression signature that regulates the brain’s response to cocaine.

“These results mark a substantial advance in our understanding of the neurobiological processes that control drug-related adaptations,” Day said. “They also reveal new information about how transcriptional mechanisms regulate activity-dependent processes within the central nervous system.”

The approaches used in this study, Day says, may also help dissect the role of similar gene programs that mediate other types of behavior, memory formation or neuropsychiatric disorders.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

T-Mobile has thousands more 5G cities than Verizon and AT&T, Ookla says:

T-Mobile has almost 20 times more 5G cities than AT&T and Verizon combined, according to a new analytics report by Ookla. T-Mobile is sitting on 5,013 cities with 5G -- and that's before adding in the former 5G sites of Sprint after the carrier's $26.5 billion merger with Sprint -- while AT&T has 237 5G cities and Verizon has 39.

Verizon was by far the fastest in speeds, though, charting at a speed score of 870 in comparison to AT&T's 78 and T-Mobile's 64 in Ookla's report.

"Only T-Mobile is doing the hard work to deliver 5G coverage and performance. Sure, it would be easier to deliver blazing speeds in postage stamp-sized areas like Verizon, but our strategy is different," said Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile. "T-Mobile's strategy is built on delivering a meaningful 5G experience people can actually use."

There are now 5,164 cities across the US with 5G, according to Ookla.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Announcing a new kind of open source organization

Google has deep roots in open source. We're proud of our 20 years of contributions and community collaboration. The scale and tenure of Google's open source participation has taught us what works well, what doesn't, and where the corner cases are that challenge projects.

One of the places we've historically seen projects stumble is in managing their trademarks—their project's name and logo. How project trademarks are used is different from how their code is used, as trademarks are a method of quality assurance. This includes the assurance that the code in question has an open source license. When trademarks are properly managed, project maintainers can define their identity, provide assurances to downstream users of the quality of their offering, and give others in the community certainty about the free and fair use of the brand.

In collaboration with academic leaders, independent contributors, and SADA Systems, today we are announcing the Open Usage Commons, an organization focused on extending the philosophy and definition of open source to project trademarks. The mission of the Open Usage Commons is to help open source projects assert and manage their project identity through programs specific to trademark management and conformance testing. Creating a neutral, independent ownership for these trademarks gives contributors and consumers peace of mind regarding their use of project names in a fair and transparent way.

Is it good or a new kind of evil?

Also at Phoronix.

Original Submission