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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

An irresistible scent makes locusts swarm, study finds:

On its own, a locust is fairly harmless. But so-called solitary locusts can undergo a metamorphosis, changing colour and joining together with millions of others in catastrophic clouds that strip fields.

So what prompts locusts to transform from solitary to "gregarious"?

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature reveals the secret lies in a pheromone.

Almost like an irresistible perfume, the chemical compound is emitted by locusts when they find themselves in proximity to just a few others of their kind.

The chemical attracts other locusts, who join the group and also begin emitting the scent, creating a feedback loop that results in enormous swarms.

The discovery offers several tantalizing possibilities, including genetically engineering locusts without the receptors that detect the swarming pheromone, or weaponising the pheromone to attract and trap the insects.

[...] It focused on the migratory locust, the most widely distributed species of the insect, and examined several compounds produced by the bug.

It found that one in particular—4-vinylanisole, or 4VA—appeared to attract locusts when emitted, and that the more locusts flocked together, the more 4VA they emitted.

Journal Reference:
Xiaojiao Guo, Qiaoqiao Yu, Dafeng Chen, et al. 4-Vinylanisole is an aggregation pheromone in locusts [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2610-4)

Recently:
(2020-07-06) Crunch, Crunch: Africa's Locust Outbreak is Far from Over
(2020-04-19) Africa's Huge Locust Swarms are Growing at the Worst Time
(2020-02-24) Locust Swarms Arrive in South Sudan, Threatening More Misery
(2020-01-30) Climate Change Behind Africa's Worst Locust Invasion in Decades

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices:

Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook's pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion? Zuckermining? Facebaiting? Was it a Zuckerpunch? The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when "you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to."

[...] Researchers call these design and wording decisions "dark patterns," a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to "please turn on notifications," and doesn't present an option to decline? That's a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to "log out" when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That's a dark pattern too.

Dark patterns show up all over the web, nudging people to subscribe to newsletters, add items to their carts, or sign up for services. But, says says Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University, they're particularly insidious "when you're deciding what privacy rights to give away, what data you're willing to part with." Gray has been studying dark patterns since 2015. He and his research team have identified five basic types: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference, and forced action. All of those show up in privacy controls. He and other researchers in the field have noticed the cognitive dissonance between Silicon Valley's grand overtures toward privacy and the tools to modulate these choices, which remain filled with confusing language, manipulative design, and other features designed to leech more data.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

How to turn regular bricks into electricity-storing supercapacitors:

Usually the phrase "power brick" refers affectionately to the AC adapter of something like a laptop. But what if that term was quite literal, involving an actual brick?

A team led by Hongmin Wang at Washington University in St. Louis set out to make a genuine power brick. More specifically, they wanted to see if they could use a vapor coating technique to turn ordinary red bricks into part of a supercapacitor. That actually isn't quite as weird as it sounds, given that the red of a brick is an iron mineral, and iron is a common component of some battery chemistries. Bricks are often porous as well, meaning there is plenty of surface area where a thin coating could interact with that iron.

The process (something they had developed previously) involves heating the brick in an enclosure along with hydrochloric acid and an organic compound that mercifully shortens to "EDOT." The two liquid substances evaporate and condense on the brick's convoluted surface. The acid dissolves some of the iron mineral, freeing up iron atoms that help the organic molecules link up to form polymer chains (graduating to "PEDOT") that coat the surface. The polymer makes microscopic, entangled fibers that form a continuous and electrically conductive layer on each face of the brick, which otherwise remains. (This does have the effect of turning the brick black, though.)

[...] Even with full-size bricks, the total energy storage is... less than huge. They estimate that a wall of these bricks could hold about 1.6 watt-hours per square meter of wall area. That means a three meter by six meter (10 feet by 20 feet) wall could hold about 20 watt-hours of electricity. As a result, the researchers' pitch for this idea is less dramatic than "turn your house into a battery!"

Journal Reference:
Hongmin Wang, Yifan Diao, Yang Lu, et al. Energy storing bricks for stationary PEDOT supercapacitors [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17708-1)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Critical Intel Flaw Afflicts Several Motherboards, Server Systems, Compute Modules:

A critical privilege-escalation flaw affects several popular Intel motherboards, server systems and compute modules.

Intel is warning of a rare critical-severity vulnerability affecting several of its motherboards, server systems and compute modules. The flaw could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to achieve escalated privileges.

The recently patched flaw (CVE-2020-8708) ranks 9.6 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, making it critical. Dmytro Oleksiuk, who discovered the flaw, told Threatpost that it exists in the firmware of Emulex Pilot 3. This baseboard-management controller is a service processor that monitors the physical state of a computer, network server or other hardware devices via specialized sensors.

[...] The critical flaw stems from improper-authentication mechanisms in these Intel products before version 1.59.

In bypassing authentication, an attacker would be able to access to the KVM console of the server. The KVM console can access the system consoles of network devices to monitor and control their functionality. The KVM console is like a remote desktop implemented in the baseboard management controller – it provides an access point to the display, keyboard and mouse of the remote server, Oleksiuk told Threatpost.

The flaw is dangerous as it's remotely exploitable, and attackers don't need to be authenticated to exploit it – though they need to be located in the same network segment as the vulnerable server, Oleksiuk told Threatpost.

"The exploit is quite simple and very reliable because it's a design flaw," Oleksiuk told Threatpost.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Homeland Security details new tools for extracting device data at US borders:

Travelers heading to the US have many reasons to be cautious about their devices when it comes to privacy. A report released Thursday from the Department of Homeland Security provides even more cause for concern about how much data border patrol agents can pull from your phones and computers.

In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated July 30, the DHS detailed its US Border Patrol Digital Forensics program, specifically for its development of tools to collect data from electronic devices. For years, DHS and border agents were allowed to search devices without a warrant, until a court found the practice unconstitutional in November 2019.

In 2018, the agency searched more than 33,000 devices, compared to 30,200 searches in 2017 and just 4,764 searches in 2015. Civil rights advocates have argued against this kind of surveillance, saying it violates people's privacy rights.

[...] The DHS said the privacy risks of using the tools are low because only trained forensics technicians will have access to the tools, and only data relevant to investigations will be extracted.

That assurance is in stark contrast from what lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found, after a lawsuit revealed that agents had searched through travelers' devices without any restrictions, and often for unrelated reasons like enforcing bankruptcy laws and helping outside investigations.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

A nifty move with nitrogen has brought the world one step closer to creating a range of useful products—from dyes to pharmaceuticals—out of thin air.

The discovery comes from a team of Yale chemists who found a way to combine atmospheric nitrogen with benzene to make a chemical compound called aniline, which is a precursor to materials used to make an assortment of synthetic products.

[...] Holland said previous attempts by other researchers to combine atmospheric nitrogen and benzene failed. Those attempts used highly reactive derivatives of benzene that would degrade before they could produce a chemical reaction with nitrogen.

Holland and his colleagues used an iron compound to break down one of the chemical bonds in benzene. They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene.

Journal Reference:
Sean F. McWilliams et al. Coupling dinitrogen and hydrocarbons through aryl migration, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2565-5

Original Submission

cmdrklarg writes:

Arecibo Observatory featured in James Bond film "Goldeneye" shut down:

The famous observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, featured in the James Bond movie "GoldenEye," has been forced to temporarily close after a broken cable smashed through the side of its massive dish.

Around 2:45 a.m. Monday, a three-inch auxiliary cable that helped support a metal platform broke, according to a news release from the University of Central Florida. UCF manages the facility alongside Universidad Ana G. Méndez and Yang Enterprises, Inc.

When the cable broke, it created a 100-foot gash in the telescope's 1,000-foot-long reflector dish, according to UCF. It also damaged about six to eight panels along the observatory's Gregorian Dome, which is suspended over the reflector dish.

Also at WIRED and Science Mag

[Ed Note - Arecibo was also a filming location for the movies Contact and Species.]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Why movie theaters are in trouble after DOJ nixes 70-year-old case:

By the late 1930s, the majority of power in Hollywood was concentrated in the hands of eight film studios, with the so-called Big Five—Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and RKO—holding the lion's share of the market. The studios not only locked actors into contracts and controlled film production and the distribution of those films, but also they bought up and founded movie theaters all over the country and thus controlled exhibition as well.

The DOJ [US Department of Justice] filed suit in 1938 alleging the eight studios were violating antitrust law in two key ways. First, the DOJ said, the studios were part of an unlawful price-fixing conspiracy, and second, they were monopolizing the distribution and exhibition sectors.

A federal District Court found in 1940 that the studios were indeed in violation of the law, which ended up leading to a whole long series of other legal challenges and appeals. In the end, the US Supreme Court in 1948 ruled 7-1 in favor of the DOJ in United States v. Paramount Pictures. The agreements the studios reached with the government, called consent decrees, required the studios to divest all their stakes in movie theater chains. They also had to end the practice of block booking, in which studios would require theaters to book a whole block of content—films and shorts—if they wanted to exhibit any of that content.

[...] In April 2018, the Justice Department announced it would undertake a review of "legacy" consent decrees put in place during the late 19th and 20th centuries as part of an agency-wide modernization initiative.

takyon writes:

Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.

The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.

Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.

[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.

Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.

Changing World, Changing Mozilla

Tweet.

Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Upcoming Samsung smartphones will use variable refresh rate displays to lower power consumption when static content is being displayed:

Today, Samsung Display is announcing that they are for the first time revealing new generation display panels that allow for variable refresh rate technology, alleviating one of the biggest draw-backs of current generation high-refresh-rate smartphones. The new technology is makings its debut in the new Galaxy Note20 Ultra, which should be available to the public in just two short weeks.

[...] Samsung's new display panel employed in the new Note20 Ultra is actually described as a VRR panel, with Samsung promising new refresh rate modes such as the ability to operate at 120, 60, 30 and 10Hz modes. The latter super-low refresh rates have been to date never been used in smartphones. Samsung describes that the display will now be able to lower itself down to this new 10Hz mode when viewing static content.

Samsung describes the usage of a new backplane technology in order to achieve this – whilst we haven't had an official response from Samsung to our questions on the matter, there's been rumours that this is the generation in which the company has introduced LTPO backplane technology, allowing it higher switching performance and lower power consumption.

Another question which remains to be answered is exact details on Samsung's VRR workings, and whether it is a proper implementation of adaptive sync technology and if it has finer refresh rate granularity in the 10-120Hz beyond just the mentioned 60 and 30Hz examples.

Refresh rates as low as 1 Hz have also been rumored. Apple owns a patent on the technology and may be introducing it into iPhones starting in 2021.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

US Appeals Court Reverses Antitrust Ruling in FTC vs Qualcomm

It's been over three years since the United States FTC had charged Qualcomm with antitrust violations over cellular modem patents and business practices. That suit ultimately received a ruling in May of 2019 against Qualcomm, resulting in an injunction for Qualcomm to renegotiate its licensing agreements with its customers. Qualcomm had subsequently appealed the ruling, putting the order on hold, and today, a bit over a year later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has finally issued an opinion, reversing and vacating the injunction, resulting in a win for Qualcomm at this moment in time.

The appeals court's opinion centres around the FTC's use of anti-trust law to hold Qualcomm accountable for some of its controversial business practices in how it handles licensing of its patent portfolio and its "no license, no chip" mode of operation. The opinion attacks the original judgment in that the arguments presented do not fall under the umbrella of anti-trust law violations, and instead it being a matter of contract and patent law.

Previously: U.S. Federal Trade Commission Sues Qualcomm for Anti-Competitive Practices
US DOJ, Worried About 5G Race, Asks For Hearing If Qualcomm's Declared A Monopoly

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Charter tries to convince FCC that broadband customers want data caps

Charter Communications has claimed to the Federal Communications Commission that broadband users enjoy having Internet plans with data caps, in a filing arguing that Charter should be allowed to impose caps on its Spectrum Internet service starting next year.

Charter isn't currently allowed to impose data caps because of conditions the FCC placed on its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The data-cap condition is scheduled to expire on May 18, 2023, but Charter in June petitioned the FCC to let the condition expire two years early, in May 2021.

With consumer-advocacy groups and Internet users opposing the petition, Charter filed a response with the FCC last week, saying that plans with data caps are "popular."

"Contrary to Stop The Cap's assertion [in an FCC filing] that consumers 'hate' data caps, the marketplace currently shows that broadband service plans incorporating data caps or other usage-based pricing mechanisms are often popular when the limits are sufficiently high to satisfy the vast majority of users," Charter told the FCC.

Or you could offer some kind of software that shows which users are hogging the network.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Highly efficient process makes seawater drinkable in 30 minutes:

A new study has used a material called a metal-organic framework (MOF) to filter pollutants out of seawater, generating large amounts of fresh water per day while using much less energy than other methods.

MOFs are extremely porous materials with high surface areas – theoretically, if one teaspoon of the stuff was unpacked it could cover a football field. That much surface area makes it great for grabbing hold of molecules and particles.

In this case, the team developed a new type of MOF dubbed PSP-MIL-53, and put it to work trapping salt and impurities in brackish water and seawater. When the material is placed in the water, it selectively pulls ions out of the liquid and holds them on its surface. Within 30 minutes, the MOF was able to reduce the total dissolved solids (TDS) in the water from 2,233 parts per million (ppm) to under 500 ppm. That's well below the threshold of 600 ppm that the World Health Organization recommends for safe drinking water.

Using this technique, the material was able to produce as much as 139.5 L (36.9 gal) of fresh water per kg of MOF per day. And once the MOF is "full" of particles, it can be quickly and easily cleaned for reuse. To do so, it's placed in sunlight, which causes it to release the captured salts in as little as four minutes.

Journal Reference:
Ranwen Ou, Huacheng Zhang, Vinh X. Truong, et al. A sunlight-responsive metal–organic framework system for sustainable water desalination, Nature Sustainability (DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-0590-x)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks:

The eye-catching factoid emerged during a DEF CON video interview of PTP's [Pen Test Partners] Alex Lomas, where the man himself gave a walkthrough of a 747-400, its avionics bay and the flight deck.

Although airliners are not normally available to curious infosec researchers, a certain UK-based Big Airline's decision to scrap its B747 fleet gave Pen Test Partners a unique opportunity to get aboard one and have a poke about before the scrap merchants set about their grim task.

"Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know," said Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. "Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won't just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don't know what state you're going to leave it in."

While giving a tour of the aircraft on video (full embed below), Lomas pointed out the navigation database loader. To readers of a certain vintage it'll look very familiar indeed.

"This database has to be updated every 28 days, so you can see how much of a chore this has to be for an engineer to visit," Lomas said, pointing out the floppy drive – which in normal operations is tucked away behind a locked panel.

Youtube Video

[...] The key question everyone wants to know the answer to, though, is whether you can hack an airliner from the cheap seats, using the in-flight entertainment (IFE) as an attack vector. Lomas observed: "Where we've gone deliberately looking, we've not found, at this point, any two-way communication between passenger domain systems like the IFE and the control domain. There is the DMZ of the information services domain that sits between the two; to jump between two layers of segregation would be tricky in my view."

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

It's time to implement a 4-day workweek

In May, Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate, floated the idea of implementing a four-day workweek to better accommodate working Americans in a time of uncertainty, saying a shorter workweek could have mental-health benefits for employees.

There's not one overarching definition of a four-day workweek. "There are different models for the shortened week, some of which envision the same output condensed into fewer hours while others simply imagine longer hours spread over fewer days," a Washington Post report said.

Some involve a three-day weekend, while others mean a day off midweek.

[...] "It would help get us off of this hamster wheel that we're on right now, where we're all sort of racing against the clock in service of this giant capital-efficiency machine," Yang said. "And the race is driving us all crazy."

In a Harris poll conducted in late May, 82% of employed US respondents said they would prefer to have a shorter workweek, even if it meant longer workdays.

The idea of a shorter workweek has become so popular in Finland that Prime Minister Sanna Marin has called for employers to allow employees to work only six hours a day, four days a week. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proposed the policy as part of a coronavirus economic recovery effort.