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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

New BlackBerry Phone Planned by Third Party:

It looks like BlackBerry hardware is back from the brink of extinction once again. Today, the security startup OnwardMobility announced plans to release a new 5G BlackBerry smartphone with a physical keyboard. It could arrive in North America and Europe as soon as the first half of 2021.

This may sound familiar. A few years ago, BlackBerry seemed to be a thing of the past. Then, TCL agreed to manufacture two BlackBerry-branded phones. In February, TCL decided not to renew the deal with BlackBerry, and this month, it stopped selling the devices. Thanks to OnwardMobility, BlackBerry may get one more chance.

Also at Arstechnica and CNet.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Super-dense lithium-sulfur battery gives electric plane a 230-mile range:

British company Oxis says it's developed safe, high-density lithium-sulfur battery chemistry and will supply Texas Aircraft Manufacturing with a 90-kWh, next-gen battery pack to power the eColt, an electric aircraft with a two hour, 230-mile range.

[...] In practice, they have had issues – notably with the old chestnut of dendrite formation, in which ion deposits on the anode grow into long spikes of conductive material that short circuit the cell and cause it to catch fire. The lithium-metal anodes also tend to degrade in less dangerous ways that eventually just make the batteries die.

In a piece written for IEEE Spectrum, Oxis head of battery development Mark Crittenden details how his team is addressing these problems with a thin layer of ceramic material at the anode, and it's resulting in high-energy cells with significantly longer lifespans than previous Li-S designs.

"Typical lithium-ion designs can hold from 100 to 265 Wh/kg, depending on the other performance characteristics for which it has been optimized, such as peak power or long life," writes Crittenden. "Oxis recently developed a prototype lithium-sulfur pouch cell that proved capable of 470 Wh/kg, and we expect to reach 500 Wh/kg within a year. And because the technology is still new and has room for improvement, it's not unreasonable to anticipate 600 Wh/kg by 2025."

Still needs work on the limited number of number of charge cycles.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Adobe Lightroom iOS update permanently deleted users' photos:

A recent update to the Adobe Lightroom app permanently deleted some iOS users' photos and presets, an Adobe rep confirmed on the Photoshop feedback forums. Adobe has since corrected the issue, which was first spotted by PetaPixel, but not before drawing the ire of many disappointed users.

[...] Needless to say, users who had just lost photos and presets were not happy. "Rikk, we understand the announcement, however this doesn't solve the problem," wrote Ewelina Wojtyczka. "People lost months/years of their work. Apologies will not bring it back."

Adobe hasn't further commented on the bug outside Flohr's post. [...] While Adobe shouldn't be let off the hook for this error, perhaps the importance of multiple backups is the hard lesson we can learn from this.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

3-D printing 'greener' buildings using local soil:

The construction industry is currently facing two major challenges: the demand for sustainable infrastructure and the need to repair deteriorating buildings, bridges and roads. While concrete is the material of choice for many construction projects, it has a large carbon footprint, resulting in high waste and energy expenditure. Today, researchers report progress toward a sustainable building material made from local soil, using a 3-D printer to create a load-bearing structure.

[...] The researchers began by collecting soil samples from a colleague's backyard and tailoring the material with a new environmentally friendly additive so that it would bind together and be easily extruded through the 3-D printer. Because soils vary greatly by location, their aim was to have a chemistry "toolkit" that could transform any type of soil into printable building material. From there Bajpayee built small-scale test structures, cubes measuring two inches on each side, to see how the material performed when extruded into stacked layers.

The next step was to ensure that the mixture is load bearing, meaning that it will stand up to the weight of the layers but also other materials used in construction such as rebar and insulation. To help with this, the researchers strengthened the clay mixture by "zippering" the microscopic layers on its surface to prevent it from absorbing water and expanding, which would compromise the printed structure. With this method, the researchers showed that the material could hold twice as much weight as the unmodified clay mixture.

Journal Reference:
Aayushi Bajpayee, Mehdi Farahbakhsh, Umme Zakira, et al. In situ Resource Utilization and Reconfiguration of Soils Into Construction Materials for the Additive Manufacturing of Buildings, frontiers in materials (2020) 7:52. DOI: 10.3389/fmats.2020.00052

The approach is thought to both lower the environmental footprint of construction on Earth and model how construction can be effected on the Moon or Mars.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

College contact-tracing app readily leaked personal data, report finds:

In an attempt to mitigate the potential spread of COVID-19, one Michigan college is requiring all students to install an app that will track their live locations at all times. Unfortunately, researchers have already found two major vulnerabilities in the app that can expose students' personal and health data.

Albion College informed students two weeks before the start of the fall term that they would be required to install and run the contact tracing app, called Aura.

[...] Aura, however, goes all in on real-time location-tracking instead, as TechCrunch reports. The app collects students' names, location, and COVID-19 status, then generates a QR code containing that information.

[...] TechCrunch used a network analysis tool to discover that the code was not generated on a device but rather on a hidden Aura website—and that TechCrunch could then easily change the account number in the URL to generate new QR codes for other accounts and receive access to other individuals' personal data.

A student at Albion, looking into the app's source code, also found hard-coded security keys for the app's backend servers. A researcher took a look and verified that those keys gave access to "patient data, including COVID-19 test results with names, addresses, and dates of birth," TechCrunch reports.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Last-minute California ruling means Uber and Lyft won't shut down today:

A California judge has granted Uber and Lyft an emergency reprieve from an order requiring them to treat their drivers as employees. The companies were facing a Thursday deadline to comply with the order. Earlier today, Lyft announced that it would be forced to shut down in the state at midnight tonight.

[...] Uber had warned that it was likely to do the same if the courts didn't delay enforcement of the law.

[...] The judge's emergency stay means that Lyft and Uber will be able to keep operating under their current model while they continue litigating whether the new law applies to them.

Previously:
California Judge Rules Uber and Lyft to Immediately Classify Drivers as Employees

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Cities sue Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, claim they owe cable “franchise fees”:

Four cities in Indiana are suing Netflix and other video companies, claiming that online video providers and satellite-TV operators should have to pay the same franchise fees that cable companies pay for using local rights of way.

The lawsuit was filed against Netflix, Disney, Hulu, DirecTV, and Dish Network on August 4 in Indiana Commercial Court in Marion County. The cities of Indianapolis, Evansville, Valparaiso, and Fishers want the companies to pay the cable-franchise fees established in Indiana's Video Service Franchises (VSF) Act, which requires payments of 5 percent of gross revenue in each city.

Inspired by? Charter Can Charge Online Video Sites for Network Connections, Court Rules

Original Submission

Freeman and an Anonymous Coward wrote it with story submissions about a government-backed effort to create a custom iPod.

The submissions, from Gizmodo and Ars Technica, are both sourced from: The Case of the Top Secret iPod. Like a good mystery story, it reads like a spy mystery thriller. It starts off with:

It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year's iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software—my boss's boss—abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. "I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn't know about it. You'll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me."

The next day, the receptionist called to tell me that two men were waiting in the lobby. I went downstairs to meet Paul and Matthew, the engineers who would actually build this custom iPod. I'd love to say they wore dark glasses and trench coats and were glancing in window reflections to make sure they hadn't been tailed, but they were perfectly normal thirty-something engineers. I signed them in, and we went to a conference room to talk.

[...] They didn't actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod's disk in a way that couldn't be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.

They'd do all the work. My job was to provide any help they needed from Apple.

There's speculation about what the modified device actually did, but no "smoking gun". Geiger counter? Voice recorder? Something else? What could it be?

Without violating any non-disclosure agreements, are there any Soylentils who'd worked on any clandestine projects who'd like to weigh in?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A 35-year-old bug in patch found in efforts to restore 29 year old 2.11BSD:

Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's been a faithful alley [sic] for a long, long time. I've never had a problem with patch until I embarked on the 2.11BSD restoration project. In going over the logs very carefully, I've discovered a bug that bites this effort twice. It's quite interesting to use 27 year old patches to find this bug while restoring a 29 year old OS...

After some careful research, this turned out to be a fairly obscure bug in an odd edge case caused by "the state of email in the 1980s." which can be relegated to the dustbin of history...

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

FCC asks for more public input on whether to let Charter impose data caps:

The Federal Communications Commission is taking another round of public comments on Charter's petition seeking permission to impose data caps on broadband users and charge network-interconnection fees to online-video providers, following a court ruling that may complicate the FCC's decision.

The deadline for comments on Charter's petition passed on August 6. But in a public notice issued today, the FCC said it is opening an additional comment period that will last until September 2, giving people time to weigh in on the impact of the court ruling.

"To ensure that the [Wireline Competition] Bureau has a full record upon which to evaluate the effects of the conditions, we initiate this additional comment period," the FCC notice said, while also inviting commenters to "address the effect" of the new court ruling on the FCC's consideration of Charter's petition. As before, comments can be submitted on the docket by clicking "New Filing" or "Express." There are more than 1,500 filings, mostly from consumers who object to data caps.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Microsoft 365 apps to end Internet Explorer support next year:

Internet Explorer's days have been numbered since Microsoft launched its Edge browser five years ago. Microsoft appears to be another step toward closer to retiring the web browser with the announcement its Microsoft 365 apps suite will end support for Internet Explorer 11 on Aug. 17, 2021, the company said Monday.

Users of Microsoft's Teams chat and collaboration service will lose IE 11 support a bit earlier, on Nov. 30, Microsoft said in a blog post. Microsoft also said it would end support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app on March 9, 2021.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Universe Has Made Almost All the Stars It Will Ever Make:

But there's a big puzzle here. Exactly what puts a cap on the number of stars the universe has made and will ever make? This question has long been a subject of intense astrophysical debate, particularly in relation to the stellar composition of individual galaxies. For example, our current cosmological paradigm (or at least the one that most scientists subscribe to) is that we live in a universe dominated by dark matter, and in a dark matter universe the biggest galaxies should have formed the most recently,4 being assembled by the hierarchical, gravitationally driven merger of smaller systems. Yet if you examine very large, massive galaxies you find that they tend to be composed of older stars, suggesting that they've already sat around in their dotage for a very long time.

To try to explain this, astronomers invoke the idea of "quenching," where something acts to suppress or shut down the formation of new stars across galaxies. Not surprisingly, you need a pretty potent mechanism to quench anything on these scales, and among the most plausible culprits are the supermassive black holes that exist at the core of most galaxies and which can flood the space around them with photons and particles emitted from material as it screeches toward their event horizons. That outward transfer of energy can, quite literally, blow away the interstellar gas that would otherwise cool and clump into new stars.

The precise details of how this might work are certainly not yet fully understood. But there are new tantalizing clues in the fact that the masses of supermassive black holes appear to correlate with the mass of stars contained in their host galaxies.5 That is pretty shocking because even a supermassive black hole a billion times the mass of our sun only occupies a volume similar to that of our solar system. So somehow a galaxy that spans tens of thousands of light-years is intimately related to what is, in effect, a microscopic dot at its center.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

MRAM Tech Startup Says Its Device Solves DRAM's Row Hammer Vulnerability

Fremont, Calif.-based magnetic RAM startup, Spin Memory, says it has developed a transistor that allows MRAM and resistive RAM to be scaled down considerably. According to the company, the device could also defeat a stubborn security vulnerability in DRAM called Row Hammer.

Spin Memory calls the device the "Universal Selector." In a memory cell, the selector is the transistor used to access the memory element—a magnetic tunnel junction in MRAM, a resistive material in RRAM, and a capacitor in DRAM. These are usually built into the body of the silicon, with the memory element constructed above them. Making the selector smaller and simplifying the layout of interconnects that contact it, leads to more compact memory cells.

[...] With DRAM, the main memory of choice for computers, the Universal Selector has an interesting side-effect: it should make the memory immune to the Row Hammer. This vulnerability occurs when a row of DRAM cells is rapidly charged and discharged. (Basically, flipping the bits at an extremely high rate.) Stray charge from this action can migrate to a neighboring row of cells, corrupting the bits there. [...] According to Lewis, the new device is immune to this problem because the transistor channel is outside of the bulk of the silicon, and so it's isolated from the wandering charge. "This is a root-cause fix for row hammer," he says.

Related: The Rowhammer is Here... Next Heartbleed?
DRAM Leakage Side Effect Exploited for Privilege Escalation on Both DDR3 & DDR4
Everspin Announces New MRAM Products
Potentially Disastrous Rowhammer Bitflips Can Bypass ECC Protections
Samsung Announces Mass Production of Commercial Embedded Magnetic Random Access Memory (eMRAM)
Researchers Use Rowhammer Bit Flips to Steal 2048-bit Crypto Key
GlobalFoundries Produces Embedded Magnetoresistive Non-Volatile Memory (eMRAM) on a "22nm" Process

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA Is Tracking a Vast, Growing Anomaly in Earth's Magnetic Field:

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) – likened by NASA to a 'dent' in Earth's magnetic field, or a kind of 'pothole in space' – generally doesn't affect life on Earth, but the same can't be said for orbital spacecraft (including the International Space Station), which pass directly through the anomaly as they loop around the planet at low-Earth orbit altitudes.

[...] The primary source is considered to be a swirling ocean of molten iron inside Earth's outer core, thousands of kilometres below the ground. The movement of that mass generates electrical currents that create Earth's magnetic field, but not necessarily uniformly, it seems.

A huge reservoir of dense rock called the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, located about 2,900 kilometres (1,800 miles) below the African continent, disturbs the field's generation, resulting in the dramatic weakening effect – which is aided by the tilt of the planet's magnetic axis.

"The observed SAA can be also interpreted as a consequence of weakening dominance of the dipole field in the region," says NASA Goddard geophysicist and mathematician Weijia Kuang.

Phoenix666 writes:

Wastewater grit may find use in "green" pothole filler:

Currently, potholes are filled with asphalt. Unfortunately, though, that material contains toxic substances known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These are dangerous both to the workers applying the patches, and to other people who may be exposed to the hydrocarbons as they leach out of the asphalt and into the environment.

The leftover grit that's used in wastewater treatment is also problematic. Not only is it non-biodegradable, but because it contains pathogens, it can't be recycled as is. With that in mind, researchers at California State University-Bakersfield set out to make the substance more useful.

They started by mixing wet grit with calcium oxide and magnesium oxide, creating a gritty slurry in which pathogens can't proliferate. Next, they converted that slurry into a mortar by adding a weak acid called potassium dihydrogen phosphate. The result was a chemically bonded phosphate ceramic (CBPC), which the team refers to as a grit assisted patch (GAP).

The lab found the composite to have compressive strength similar to asphalt.

ACS Press Release

Original Submission