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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Japan Animation Leaders Unite for YouTube Initiative:

Toei Animation, Kodansha and other anime content providers have banded together to start a channel on YouTube. The goal is to have 30 companies providing 3,000 anime titles by 2022, with the number of views per month reaching 300 million.

Called Animelog, or Anilog, the channel was launched Friday by Analyzelog, a company that supports corporate digital strategies. The target audience for the channel is currently local, but there are also plans to add sub-titled content in English and Chinese for overseas fans.

[...] "There exists a problem of illegal video distribution service these days, but "AnimeLog" will distribute only officially-licensed animations and operate as a safe channel that families can enjoy together," said Analyzelog in a statement.

Currently, the AnimeLog アニメログ channel has 225k subscribers with no content.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

China Is Approaching the Release of Digital Yuan by Expanding its Trials:

As the idea of issuing the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is gaining traction worldwide, China makes practical steps to make their digital yuan release closer. Now, the country is going to expand its trials to test the CBDC potential on a larger scale.

CoinIdol, a world blockchain news outlet, has reported the start of the first digital yuan trials back in spring 2020. Initially, it covered four locations across the country: the cities of Chengdu, Suzhou, Shenzhen, and Xiong'An. It included major commercial banks of the country as well as some well-known global brands such as McDonald's and Starbucks.

Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the People's Bank of China (PBoC) plans on expanding the pilot's area to the country's major cities and provinces including Beijing, the provinces of Tianjin and Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta region, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The expansion is mostly targeted at checking the operation of the CBDC on a larger scale, as well as shaping of final policies before the full-fledged launch. However, the PBoC haven't provided any specific date of the expansion start, as well as the planned launch. At the same time, the institution stated that final policy-shaping is expected to be completed before the end of 2020, so the expansion is likely to start in the days ahead.

[...] The launch of the digital yuan can potentially make China the world's strongest economy, thus giving it a chance to combat the US hegemony in the world. That is why the country is very unlikely to take too long with expanding its CBDC trials as well as finishing all development processes.

Also At:
China Expands Digital Cash Pilot Program:

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AWS Cryptojacking Worm Spreads Through the Cloud:

A cryptomining worm from the group known as TeamTNT is spreading through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and collecting credentials. Once the logins are harvested, the malware logs in and deploys the XMRig mining tool to mine Monero cryptocurrency.

According to researchers at Cado Security, the worm also deploys a number of openly available malware and offensive security tools, including "punk.py," a SSH post-exploitation tool; a log cleaning tool; the Diamorphine rootkit; and the Tsunami IRC backdoor.

It is, they said, the first threat observed in the wild that specifically targets AWS for cryptojacking purposes. However, it also carries out more familiar fare.

"The worm also steals local credentials, and scans the internet for misconfigured Docker platforms," according to a Monday posting. "We have seen the attackers...compromise a number of Docker and Kubernetes systems."

[...] Cado researchers suggested that to thwart such attacks, businesses should identify which systems are storing AWS credential files and delete them if they aren't needed. Also, review network traffic for any connections to mining pools or those sending the AWS credentials file over HTTP; and, use firewall rules to limit any access to Docker APIs.

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takyon writes:

TikTok plans to sue Trump administration over US ban

TikTok plans to sue the Trump administration over its executive order banning transactions between U.S. companies and the popular video-sharing app as well as its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

"Even though we strongly disagree with the Administration's concerns, for nearly a year we have sought to engage in good faith to provide a constructive solution," a TikTok spokesperson told The Hill. "What we encountered instead was a lack of due process as the Administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses," the spokesperson continued. "To ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and users are treated fairly, we have no choice but to challenge the Executive Order through the judicial system," the spokesperson added.

Also at NYT and Business Insider.

Previously: Bytedance: The World's Most Valuable Startup
Lawmakers Ask US Intelligence to Assess If TikTok is a Security Threat
TikTok and 53 Other iOS Apps Still Snoop Your Sensitive Clipboard Data
India Bans TikTok, WeChat, and Other Chinese-Owned Apps
President Trump Threatens TikTok Ban, Microsoft Considers Buying TikTok's U.S. Operations[Updated 2]
TikTok: Trump Will Prohibit Transactions with Bytedance Beginning September 20

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

AT&T, T-Mobile fight speed tests that could prove their coverage maps wrong;:

The carriers' objections came in response to the FCC seeking comment on a plan to improve the nation's inadequate broadband maps. Besides submitting more accurate coverage maps, the FCC plan would require carriers to do a statistically significant amount of drive testing.

"In order to help verify the accuracy of mobile providers' submitted coverage maps, we propose that carriers submit evidence of network performance based on a sample of on-the-ground tests that is statistically appropriate for the area tested," the FCC proposal issued in July 2020 said.

This could prevent repeats of cases in which carriers exaggerated their coverage in FCC filings, which can result in government broadband funding not going to the areas where it is needed most. Small carriers that compete against the big three in rural areas previously had to conduct drive tests at their own expense in order to prove that the large carriers didn't serve the areas they claimed to serve.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai did not punish Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular after finding that the carriers exaggerated their 4G coverage in official filings. But Pai is moving ahead with plans to require more accurate maps as mandated by Congress.

Previously:
(2019-12-05) FCC Says Wireless Carriers Lie about Coverage 40% of the Time
(2019-11-23) Verizon's New 5G Coverage Maps Show Just How Sparse the Network Is
(2019-02-17) "These Maps are Bogus": U.S. Lawmakers Tear Into Telecom Execs Over Spotty Rural Coverage

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.righto.com/2020/08/reverse-engineering-8086s.html

The Intel 8086 processor was introduced in 1978, setting the course of modern computing. While the x86 processor family has supported 64-bit processing for decades, the original 8086 was a 16-bit processor. As such, it has a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU). The arithmetic logic unit is the heart of a processor: it performs arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction. It also carries out Boolean logic operations such as bitwise AND and OR as well as also bit shifts and rotates. Since a fast ALU is essential to the overall performance of a processor, ALUs often incorporate interesting design tricks.

The die photo below shows the silicon die of the 8086 processor. The ALU is in the lower-left corner. Above it are the general- and special-purpose registers. An adder, used for address calculation, is in the upper left. (For performance, the 8086 has a separate adder to add the segment register and memory offset when accessing memory.) The large microcode ROM is in the lower right.

Zooming in on the ALU shows that it is constructed from 16 nearly-identical stages, one for each bit. The upper row handles bits 7 to 0 while the lower row handles bits 15 to 8. In between, the flag circuitry indicates the status of an arithmetic operation through condition codes such as zero or nonzero, positive or negative, carry, overflow, parity, and so forth. These are typically used for conditional branches.

Previously:
(2020-08-15) How the 8086 Processor Handles Power and Clock Internally
(2020-06-27) Die Shrink: How Intel Scaled Down the 8086 Processor
(2020-05-21) Extracting ROM Constants from the 8087 Math Coprocessor's Die

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The ‘Batman Effect’: How having an alter ego empowers you:

A few years ago, assistant psychology professor [at Hamilton College in New York State, Rachel] White took a group of six-year-olds and set them a test of concentration on a computer, in which a series of images flashed and they had to press the space bar whenever they saw a picture of cheese. The task was designed to be rather boring, but the children were told that it was “a very important activity” and that they would be a “good helper” if they worked on the task for as long as possible – increasing their motivation to persevere. As a potential distraction, the researchers also left them with an iPad, with a much more fun game designed to lure them away.

Beforehand, the children were told that it could sometimes be helpful to think about their feelings, if the task got too boring. Some were told to think “Am I working hard?” while others were encouraged to think in the third-person (“Is Hannah working hard?”). A third group were given the option to change persona entirely by inhabiting the role of their favourite fictional hero, such as Batman or Dora the Explorer. They were even given props to dress up, and when they got bored, they were told to consider their behaviour as if they were the actual character, asking, for instance, “Is Batman working hard?”

RandomFactor writes:

On August 18th, Florida Keys' officials voted to allow the first test release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the U.S.

The target mosquito population (Aedes aegypti) spreads multiple diseases including yellow fever, dengue, zika and chikungunya and is difficult to control with traditional spraying.

Sometime after January 1, 2021, Florida workers will set out boxes of eggs of specially bred male yellow fever mosquitoes (a recent version called OX5034) in a stretch of Monroe County still to be chosen. The eggs, shipped from the biotech company Oxitec based in Abingdon, England, will grow into normal-looking males. Like other male mosquitoes, they drink flower nectar, not blood.

Then planners hope that during tests, these Oxitec foreigners will charm female mosquitoes into mating. A bit of saboteur genetics from the males will kill any female offspring resulting from the mating, and over time that should shrink the swarms. Sons that inherit their dad's no-daughter genes will go on to shrink the next generation even further.

Oxitec has already supplied around a billion similar mosquitoes for release in other countries.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

DARPA 3DSoC CNFET project moves towards commercialisation phase

Skywater, the US government trusted fab partner, and MIT have announced that the DARPA Three Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip (3DSoC) programme, has entered its second phase.

After completing the program's initial phase, focused on transferring the Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor (CNFET)-based 3DSoC technology into SkyWater's 200 mm production facility, phase two will focus on refining manufacturing quality, yield, performance, and density – key elements of commercial viability.

[...] A 3DSoC program update will be presented by MIT professor, Dr. Max Shulaker at the virtual 2020 DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) Summit on August 20th.

Arm Announces Three Year Partnership With DARPA Aimed At Maintaining U.S. Chip Design Lead

In a development that falls in line with recent U.S. efforts to bring semiconductor manufacturing inside its shores, British chip design house Arm announced yesterday that it has entered into a three-year partnership agreement with the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The announcement came as the agency wrapped off an event related to its Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI), which is focused on reducing reliance on internationally fabricated semiconductors.

Under the partnership, all of Arm's commercial chip design architectures and intellectual property will be available for use on DARPA projects. The duo will also collaborate on efforts such as sensors that rely on low power use for constant monitoring. At the ERI Summit yesterday, Arm's chief executive officer Simon Segars focused his discussion on devices that fall under the ambit of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the connection of these devices with next-generation 5G networks.

Previously: DARPA's 3DSoC Becoming a Reality

Related: Washington in Talks with Chipmakers about Building U.S. Factories

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Anti-Piracy Outfit Hires VPN Expert to Help Track Down The Pirate Bay * TorrentFreak:

From the beginning, OVPN has insisted that it is a no-logs provider, meaning that it should be impossible for anyone to identify who was using its service to either surf the Internet or, in The Pirate Bay's case, use the platform as an anonymous exit point to hide its true location.

The battle is playing out in court in Sweden, with OVPN insisting that it has no useful data to hand over and Rights Alliance insisting that it has. Thus far the court seems to have leaned towards OVPN's claims, that it carries no logs and as such cannot hand over any information. However, the anti-piracy veterans at Rights Alliance, who have years of experience under their belts, are refusing to let the matter drop.

The most recent move, playing out this week, is that Rights Alliance has provided testimony from an expert witness, one that has masses of experience in the VPN field.

[...] "Although [OVPN] strive to store as little data as possible, there must be data connecting users and identities to make the VPN service work. In this case, a user has paid for a VPN account with the ability to connect a public static address to OVPN which the user has then chosen to link to the file sharing site 'the piratebay', i.e the user has configured his VPN account to point to the given domain."

martyb writes:

Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:

Greenland's massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.

That is equivalent to an additional three million tonnes of water streaming into global oceans every day, or six Olympic pools every second.

Crumbling glaciers and torrents of melt-water slicing through Greenland's ice block—as thick as ten Eiffel Towers end-to-end—were the single biggest source of global sea level rise in 2019 and accounted for 40 percent of the total, researchers reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

[...] "2019 and the four other record-loss years have all occurred in the last decade," lead author Ingo Sasgen, a glaciologist at the Helmholtze Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told AFP.

The ice sheet is now tracking the worst-case global warming scenario of the UN's climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, noted Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

[...] Until 2000, Greenland's [runoff ...] was compensated by fresh snowfall.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Did a journal retract your paper on homeopathy? Meet the journal that will publish your complaint:

A homeopathy journal that Elsevier dropped in the wake of concerns about excessive self-citation appears to have carved out a new niche for itself: self-pity.

In 2016, Homeopathy lost its slot on Thomson Reuters's (now Clarivate's)  influential journal rankings list after an analysis found that more than 70% of citations in the papers it published were of papers it published. That led Elsevier to cut the journal loose — although it remains in business under the umbrella of Thieme, and has since earned its impact factor back. (For more on why that's important to journals, see this story.)

Part of Homeopathy's mission under new ownership, it seems, is to criticize journals that have spurned its contributors. Well, one journal, anyway.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Major quantum computational breakthrough is shaking up physics and maths:

MIP* = RE is not a typo. It is a groundbreaking discovery and the catchy title of a recent paper in the field of quantum complexity theory. Complexity theory is a zoo of "complexity classes" – collections of computational problems – of which MIP* and RE are but two.

The 165-page paper shows that these two classes are the same. That may seem like an insignificant detail in an abstract theory without any real-world application. But physicists and mathematicians are flocking to visit the zoo, even though they probably don't understand it all. Because it turns out the discovery has astonishing consequences for their own disciplines.

[...] RE stands for problems that can be solved by a computer. It is the zoo. Let's have a look at some subclasses.

[...] Allowing the provers of MIP to share an entangled qubit leads to the class MIP*.

It seems obvious that communication between the provers can only serve to help the provers coordinate lies rather than assist the interrogator in discovering truth. For that reason, nobody expected that allowing more communication would make computational problems more reliable and solvable. Surprisingly, we now know that MIP* = RE. This means that quantum communication behaves wildly differently to normal communication.

IP = Interactive Polynomial time solvable using an interactive proof.
MIP = Multiple Interactive Provers that are not allowed to communicate between each other.
RE = Recursively Enumerable.

[Edited to add a definition for RE and to correct the definition of IP. - Ed]

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Microsoft Flight Simulator's Data Insanity Spawns Enormous Buildings And Anomalies From OpenStreetMap:

The OpenStreetMap project is an excellent example of how powerful crowdsourced data can be, but that's not to say the system is perfect. Invalid data, added intentionally or otherwise, can sometimes slip through the cracks and lead to some interesting problems. A fact that developers Asobo Studio are becoming keenly aware of as players explore their recently released Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

Like a Wiki, users can update OpenStreetMap and about a year ago, user nathanwright120 marked a 2 story building near Melbourne, Australia as having an incredible 212 floors[*] (we think it's this commit). The rest of his edits seem legitimate enough, so it's a safe bet that it was simply a typo made in haste. The sort of thing that could happen to anyone. Not long after, thanks to the beauty of open source, another user picked up on the error and got it fixed up.

But not before some script written by Asobo Studio went through [and] sucked up the OpenStreetMap data for Australia and implemented it into their virtual recreation of the planet. The result is that the hotly anticipated flight simulator now features a majestic structure in the Melbourne skyline [Tweet] that rises far above...everything.

The whole thing is great fun, and honestly, players probably wouldn't even mind if it got left in as a Easter egg. It's certainly providing them with some free publicity; in the video below you can see a player by the name of Conor O'Kane land his aircraft on the dizzying edifice, a feat which has earned him nearly 100,000 views in just a few days.

[*] By way of comparison, the tallest building in the world — the Burj Khalifa — has 163 floors. This "Tower of Melbourne" exceeds that record by nearly 50 floors!

There are links to a YouTube video: Landing on the Melbourne Citadel in Microsoft Flight Simulator (06:30) and also to a Redit thread Found the Wall in the North.

It's a great article that considers the challenges of validating user-sourced data — well worth the quick read!

Which leads me to ask: what glaring data errors have you encountered, user-sourced or otherwise?

Previously:
(2020-08-02) How Microsoft Flight Simulator Returned to the Skies

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Tesla stock reaches $2,000 amid soaring interest in EV companies:

Tesla's stock closed at a record high of $2,000 on Thursday, pushing the company's market capitalization to $370 billion. Tesla has been on a weeklong rally since announcing a five-for-one stock split. The split will be distributed to anyone who holds the stock tomorrow—Friday, August 21.

A little more than two months have passed since Tesla's stock first reached $1,000 per share. Last month, Tesla announced a solid second-quarter profit of $104 million. It was the fourth straight quarter of profits.

That could qualify Tesla for inclusion in the S&P 500 stock index. If Tesla wins a slot in the S&P 500, funds that track the index would need to buy Tesla shares. That could push the stock price up even further.

Original Submission