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DECbot writes:

Michael Larabel writes in Phoronix about Microsoft's new open-source process monitor for Linux:

Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software is ProcMon for Linux, a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite.
 
Microsoft's ProcMon tool is a C++-written, open-source process monitor for Linux that makes it convenient to trace system call activity. This ProcMon Linux version is open-source under an MIT license.
 
Microsoft released the source code to their ProcMon Linux version on Thursday and is marked as a 1.0 preview release. Microsoft is also making available a Debian/Ubuntu package of this preview build.

The Phoronix article includes a gif demonstrating ProcMon. To my amateur eyes, this looks like htop without the resource monitoring and instead has some stack tracing capabilities. Has anybody given Microsoft's ProcMon a test drive? What are your thoughts?

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

US Attorney General William Barr has accused Hollywood and US tech firms of "collaborating" with the Chinese government to do business there.

Companies like Disney routinely agreed to censor films while Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple were "all too willing" to work with Beijing, he said.

Such actions risked undermining the liberal world order, Mr Barr added.

His intervention is the latest criticism of China by White House and other US officials.

Tensions between the US and China have been rising over a host of issues. The US this week removed Hong Kong's preferential trade status, after China brought in a controversial new security law for the territory.

Does working with China mean freedoms are undermined elsewhere?

Also at the Hollywood Reporter. DoJ: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks on China Policy at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Netflix has seen a surge in sign-ups due to the coronavirus lockdown, but has warned investors that subscriber growth will slow.

The streaming giant added more than 10 million subscribers in the three months to July, bringing the total of new subscribers to 26 million in 2020.

In contrast, Netflix saw 28 million new subscribers for the whole of 2019.

"Growth is slowing as consumers get through the initial shock of coronavirus and social restrictions."

Will Netflix's library expand to accommodate the growth in subscribers?

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takyon writes:

Bright House Doesn't Directly Profit From Pirating Subscribers, Court Rules

A federal court in Florida has dismissed the vicarious copyright infringement claims against ISP Bright House Networks. The company is being sued by a group of prominent record labels who argue that the Internet provider directly profited from piracy. The court disagrees, characterizing the accusations as "a sort of 'dog-whistle' theory."

Last year a group of music industry giants, including Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros, sued Bright House Networks for failing to disconnect pirating subscribers.

Bright House is owned by Charter, which was sued in a separate complaint simultaneously. In both cases, the music companies demanded compensation for their alleged losses.

The lawsuits, which are part of a broader legal campaign against ISPs, have continued on their own paths since. Both Bright House and Charter submitted motions to dismiss the claims. For Bright House, this resulted in a victory late last week.

In February, the ISP submitted a motion to dismiss the vicarious copyright infringement claims. Bright House refuted the claim that it profited directly from pirating subscribers, something which the court now agrees.

Dismissal of vicarious liability claim (PDF).

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Cloudflare outage takes down Discord, Shopify, Politico and others – TechCrunch:

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected.

Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented." CEO Matthew Prince explains that it all came down to a bad router in Atlanta:

We had an issue that impacted some portions of the @Cloudflare network. It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone. 1/2

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 17, 2020

[...] Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify and League of Legends were all affected, giving an idea of the breadth of the issue. Not only were websites down but also some status pages meant to provide warnings and track outages. In at least one case, even the status page for the status page was down.

Also at:
Cloudflare outage cuts off connections to Discord, DownDetector and others
The Cloudflare Blog

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Phoenix666 writes:

Ancient DNA from Doggerland separates the U.K. from Europe:

Thousands of years ago the UK was physically joined to the rest of Europe through an area known as Doggerland. However, a marine inundation took place during the mid-holocene, separating the British landmass from the rest of Europe, which is now covered by the North Sea.

Scientists from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick have studied sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) from sediment deposits in the southern North Sea, an area which has not previously been linked to a tsunami that occurred 8150 years ago.

[...] Professor Vince Gaffney from the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford said, "Exploring Doggerland, the lost landscape underneath the North Sea, is one of the last great archaeological challenges in Europe. This work demonstrates that an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and scientists can bring this landscape back to life and even throw new light on one of prehistory's great natural disasters, the Storegga Tsunami.

"The events leading up to the Storegga tsunami have many similarities to those of today. Climate is changing and this impacts on many aspects of society, especially in coastal locations."

The sedaDNA technique could help predict the effects of rising sea levels on coastal environments.

Journal Reference:
Gaffney, Vincent, Fitch, Simon, Bates, Martin, et al. Multi-Proxy Characterisation of the Storegga Tsunami and Its Impact on the Early Holocene Landscapes of the Southern North Sea, Geosciences (DOI: 10.3390/geosciences10070270)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and Idaho National Laboratory (INL), have designed a new process, based on a naturally occurring protein, that could extract and purify rare earth elements (REE) from low-grade sources. It could offer a new avenue toward a more diversified and sustainable REE sector for the United States.

The protein, lanmodulin, enables a one-step extraction and purification of REEs from complex metal mixtures, including electronic waste and coal byproducts.

[...] In 2018, lanmodulin produced by certain bacteria was isolated and characterized by professor Joseph Cotruvo's team at PSU. It is the only known macro chelator that has naturally evolved to reversibly sequester REE ions. Classic macromolecules sequester elements like iron or calcium, but do not selectively sequester REEs. The LLNL and PSU teams investigated lanmodulin's solution chemistry and potential use for industry-oriented applications. Their work offers direct evidence that lanmodulin forms highly stable and water-soluble complexes across the lanthanide series while exhibiting minimal affinity for most non-REEs.

China recently threw world markets into turmoil by restricting exports of Rare Earth Elements.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Social distancing is making public transport worse for the environment than cars – here's how to fix it:

While more people opt for travel by car and private transport, the number of passengers that trains and buses can carry has also been reduced to meet social distancing guidelines. This means that people from different households must keep one to two metres apart. So, once a seat is taken, surrounding seats must be left empty.

This has had a profound effect on the climate impact of train and car travel. When running at normal capacity, public transport is more environmentally friendly than travelling by car. Although a train or bus can produce more C0₂ than a car, they transport far more people, so emissions per person are lower overall.

But under social distancing conditions, and assuming that any unfilled seats correspond to a commuter driving to work instead, diesel-powered public transport produces more C0₂ emissions per passenger than a small car.

Can passengers be seated so public transportation can be more efficient than cars while maintaining social distancing?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Western Digital releases new 18TB, 20TB EAMR drives:

Earlier this month, Western Digital announced retail availability of its Gold 16TB and 18TB CMR drives, as well as an upcoming 20TB Ultrastar SMR drive. These nine-platter disks are the largest individual hard drives widely available today.

Earlier this year, rival drive vendor Seagate promised to deliver 18TB and 20TB drives in 2020, but they have not yet materialized in retail channels.

Seagate's largest drives, like Western Digital's, needed a new technology to overcome the Magnetic Recording Trilemma—but Western Digital's EAMR (Energy Assisted Magnetic Recording) is considerably less-exotic than the HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) used by Seagate. That more conservative approach likely helped Western Digital beat its rival to market.

The maximum usable data density on a magnetic recording device is limited by three competing factors. Magnetic coercivity—the strength of magnetic field required to demagnetize a domain—must be high enough to prevent the separately recorded grains from influencing one another and corrupting data. The field strength of the write head must be high enough to overcome the coercivity of the medium. Finally, the size of the field generated by the write head must be small enough so as not to overwrite adjacent areas.

[...] Although Western Digital is continuing its research into MAMR technology, the tech used in this month's new drives—EAMR, or Energy Assisted Magnetic Recording—is considerably less exotic. Rather than alter the magnetic properties of the medium with microwave or laser emissions, EAMR simply stabilizes the write field more rapidly and accurately, by using a bias current on the main pole of the write head as well as the current on the voice coils.

The potential data loss from drive failure grows ever larger...

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

VPN firm that claims zero logs policy leaks 20 million user logs:

The VPN company in the discussion is a Hong Kong-based UFO VPN owned by Dreamfii HK Limited.

[...] Discovered by researchers from Comparitech on July 1st, 2020; the exposure occurred due to the database hosted on an Elasticsearch cluster being left without any password.

[...] Worth 894 GB, the data allegedly included plaintext passwords, IP addresses, timestamps of user connections, session tokens, information of the device, and OS being used along with geographical information in the form of tags.

[...] This, as Comparitech has rightly pointed out, goes against the service provider's privacy policy and the promises of a zero log policy it has communicated to its users:

UFO VPN does not collect, monitor, or log any traffic or use of its Virtual Private Network service, under any circumstances, on any platform.

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Freeman writes:

With morgues brimming, Texas and Arizona turn to refrigerator trucks:

Officials in Texas and Arizona have requested refrigerated trucks to hold the dead as hospitals and morgues become overwhelmed by victims of the raging COVID-19 pandemic.

"In the hospital, there are only so many places to put bodies," Ken Davis, chief medical officer of Christus Santa Rosa Health System in the San Antonio area, said in a briefing this week. "We're out of space, and our funeral homes are out of space, and we need those beds. So, when someone dies, we need to quickly turn that bed over.

"It's a hard thing to talk about," Davis added. "People's loved ones are dying."

Related Story:
Crematorium Data Prove China Was Lying About COVID-19

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Bacteria with Metal Diet Discovered in Dirty Glassware :

Caltech microbiologists have discovered bacteria that feed on manganese and use the metal as their source of calories. Such microbes were predicted to exist over a century ago, but none had been found or described until now.

"These are the first bacteria found to use manganese as their source of fuel," says Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech who, in collaboration with postdoctoral scholar Hang Yu, describes the findings in the July 16 issue of the journal Nature. "A wonderful aspect of microbes in nature is that they can metabolize seemingly unlikely materials, like metals, yielding energy useful to the cell."

The study also reveals that the bacteria can use manganese to convert carbon dioxide into biomass, a process called chemosynthesis. Previously, researchers knew of bacteria and fungi that could oxidize manganese, or strip it of electrons, but they had only speculated that yet-to-be-identified microbes might be able to harness the process to drive growth.

Leadbetter found the bacteria serendipitously after performing unrelated experiments using a light, chalk-like form of manganese. He had left a glass jar soiled with the substance to soak in tap water in his Caltech office sink before departing for several months to work off campus. When he returned, the jar was coated with a dark material.

[...] The black coating was in fact oxidized manganese generated by newfound bacteria that had likely come from the tap water itself. "There is evidence that relatives of these creatures reside in groundwater, and a portion of Pasadena's drinking water is pumped from local aquifers," he says.

Journal Reference:
Hang Yu, Jared R. Leadbetter. Bacterial chemolithoautotrophy via manganese oxidation, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2468-5)

The only thing left is to submerge the glassware in "a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Lenovo brings AMD to its gaming laptops:

It's a big week for AMD and Lenovo's partnership: On Wednesday, the two co-launched the new Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor for Lenovo's new ThinkStation P620, and Thursday, Lenovo followed up with new gaming systems. They're essentially variations on the Intel-based systems announced in May.

The laptop CPU of choice for the laptops is unsurprisingly AMD's Ryzen 4000 H series, the current-gen equivalent of the 10th-gen Intel H versions. They all can be configured with up to the Ryzen 7 4800H. The desktop incorporates the Ryzen 7 X series, AMD's counterpart to Intel's K series, topping out at the 16-core Ryzen 7 3950X.

Original Submission

charon writes:

This interview with the authors describes a fascinating book that gives facts about cosmology in a combined education and the challenges to the people who can't quite believe in the conclusions scientists draw. Looks neat.

Despite having the world's knowledge at our fingertips, we live in a time of great scientific illiteracy. Disinformation is rampant about vaccines, climate change and even pandemics like Covid-19. But it gets even trickier when talking about the origins of life, the universe, and everything. Some of the facts we often hear about the cosmos are so absurd to imagine — they can almost feel like a religious dogma.

Of course, cosmic theories are based on mountains of data, not whimsical guesses. Yet, how do scientists really know a supermassive black hole is at the center of the Milky Way? How do scientists know distant nebulae are (sometimes) made of hydrogen clouds? How do scientists know 14 billion years ago there was a massive explosion of matter and energy that formed everything in our universe?

We hear these claims often, but most of us aren't able to examine the gritty details behind a scientific theory. Two astronomers get at this problem in the new book The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook: Or, How To Beat The Big Bang (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[...] But Handbook goes one step further, explaining the scientific process in detail, so if you don't accept the mainstream Big Bang theory, you can create your own. Yes, [authors] Barnes and Lewis encourage you to take on the intellectual giants of cosmology — Einstein, Hawking, and all the rest — by taking this data and interpreting your own hypothesis.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

CNet:

A simple pair of sunglasses that projects holographic icons. A smartwatch that has a digital screen but analog hands. A temporary tattoo that, when applied to your skin, transforms your body into a living touchpad. A virtual reality controller that lets you pick up objects in digital worlds and feel their weight as you swing them around. Those are some of the projects Google has quietly been developing or funding in an effort to create the next generation of wearable technology devices.

The eyewear and smartwatch projects come from the search giant's Interaction Lab, an initiative aimed at intertwining digital and physical experiences. It's part of Google Research, an arm of the search giant with roots in academia that focuses on technical breakthroughs. The Interaction Lab was originally created within Google's hardware division in 2015, before it was spun out to join the company's research arm about two years ago, according to the resume of Alex Olwal, the lab's leader. Olwal, a senior Google researcher, previously worked at X, the company's self-described moonshot factory, and ATAP, Google's experimental hardware branch.

[...] It isn't just about selling hardware. Getting sensor packed-devices onto consumers could mean a treasure trove of data beyond what people produce on their phones or at their desks. It's an especially valuable haul for Google, which makes more than $160 billion a year in targeted ads that are informed by the personal data of people who use its services. The gadgets also create inroads to lucrative new businesses for tech giants, like health and fitness, though lawmakers and regulators have privacy concerns over Silicon Valley's ever-expanding scope.

Google wants to get closer to you.

Original Submission