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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Numerica telescope tracks satellites in broad daylight:

Given how many satellites and bits of orbital debris are now orbiting the Earth, it's becoming increasingly important to keep track of where they all are. A new telescope system allows space agencies and other clients to do so – even in broad daylight.

Developed by Colorado-based company Numerica, the technology is described as being "the first fully-functional, low-cost telescope system that can observe Earth-orbiting satellites in broad daylight at altitudes of more than 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles)."

Two prototypes have already been deployed and tested at sites in Colorado and Australia, where they were reportedly proven to be capable of detecting objects from low-Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit, both day and night. More are currently being set up at other locations, as part of the broader Numerica Telescope Network.

[...] The Numerica system received a US patent on Aug. 11th, and will be presented next month via the online Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies conference. Its tracking capabilities are demonstrated in the video below.

YouTube video: Numerica - Detection from night to day.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

How dangerous are burning electric cars?:

There' s a loud bang, and then it starts: A battery module of an electric car is on fire in the Hagerbach test tunnel. A video of the test impressively shows the energy stored in such batteries: Meter-long flames hiss through the room and produce enormous amounts of thick, black soot. The visibility in the previously brightly lit tunnel section quickly approaches zero. After a few minutes, the battery module is completely burnt out. Ash and soot have spread throughout the room.

The trial, which was funded by the Swiss Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) and in which several Empa researchers participated, took place in December 2019. The results have just been published.

[...] With the support of battery researcher Marcel Held and corrosion specialist Martin Tuchschmid from Empa, Mellert developed three test scenarios. Experts from the Hagerbach AG test tunnel and the French Centre d'études des tunnels (CETU) in Bron were also involved. "We installed test surfaces in the fire tunnel on which the soot settled," explains Martin Tuchschmid, corrosion and fire damage specialist at Empa. "After the test, the surfaces were chemically analyzed and also stored in special rooms for several months to detect possible corrosion damage."

• Scenario 1: Fire in an enclosed space
• Scenario 2: Fire in a room with sprinkler system
• Scenario 3: Fire in a tunnel with ventilation

[...] The results of the test were published in a final report in August 2020. Project leader Mellert reassures: In terms of heat development a burning electric car is not more hazardous than a burning car with a conventional drive.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil and others:

Amazon drivers hang phones in trees to compete for new orders - Business Insider:

Amazon drivers are hanging phones from trees outside Chicago Amazon delivery stations and Whole Foods stores so that they will have first dibs on accepting new orders, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The outlet viewed footage of drivers syncing their phones up to the devices that are suspended in trees and then parking nearby to wait. Amazon's system chooses drivers based on who is closest to the pickup location — meaning drivers with access to phones even slightly closer to the stores and delivery stations have a leg up on accepting orders before competing drivers.

There is a coordinated group of drivers that uses the process, Bloomberg reported. By using multiple smartphones suspended in trees that alert multiple drivers, they make it more difficult for Amazon to discover their system.

Amazon foils plot using phones in trees to get more deliveries:

Amazon appears to have stopped a strange plot that used phones in trees to game delivery route assignments. Contract drivers talking to Bloomberg said that they're now getting more routes even when they're miles away from the Whole Foods locations that had been hubs for the scheme. The tree-borne phones have vanished along with the people lurking around them, one Chicago driver said.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A single text is all it took to unleash code-execution worm in Cisco Jabber:

Until Wednesday, a single text message sent through Cisco's Jabber collaboration application was all it took to touch off a self-replicating attack that would spread malware from one Windows user to another, researchers who developed the exploit said.

The wormable attack was the result of several flaws, which Cisco patched on Wednesday, in the Chromium Embedded Framework that forms the foundation of the Jabber client. A filter that's designed to block potentially malicious content in incoming messages failed to scrutinize code that invoked a programming interface known as "onanimationstart."

[...] CVE-2020-3430 carries a severity score of 8.8.

Two other vulnerabilities—CVE-2020-3537 and CVE-2020-3498—have severity ratings of 5.7 and 6.5, respectively.

The vulnerabilities affect Cisco Jabber for Windows versions 12.1 through 12.9.1[*]. People using vulnerable versions should update as soon as possible.

[20200907_115013 UTC: Added (martyb)]

Link to download Cisco Jabber... BUT, I just downloaded a copy of the MSI using that link and found I had "Version: 12.9.0.53429, Build: 303429". Further, the Cisco advisory states that version 12.9.1 is the First Fixed Release. Something does not look right here.

Here are links to advisory entries on: (1) MITRE's Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®) List (2) NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), and (3) Cisco:

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Facebook wants its AR glasses to unlock 'perceptual superpowers'

Facebook has been developing its own AR glasses for quite a while now, and a new report from its researchers reveal[s] that the device could feature advanced audio technology. Members of the Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) Research audio team detail their work on two technologies in particular. One of the[sic], which the team is calling "Perceptual Superpowers," will allow you to enhance certain sounds and dim background noise in the real world. It will, for instance, give you a way [to] clearly hear someone sitting across you in a noisy restaurant.

The technology can do that by using the glasses' multiple microphones to capture sounds around you. It will then take note of your head and eye movements to figure out the sounds you actually want to hear and the ones you want filter out. While the researchers aren't specifically developing the technology for the hard of hearing, the glasses could help those who'd rather not use hearing aids in social situations. Thomas Lunner, one of the researchers who also worked on the world's first digital hearing aid, said: "By putting hearing impaired people on par with people with normal hearing, we could help them become more socially engaged. This resonates very well with Facebook's mission in the sense that hearing loss often keeps people away from social situations."

Also at ZDNet and 9to5Mac.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Winamp Skin Museum is a beautiful homage to an iconic piece of software:

One of [Winamp's] most beloved features was the ability to personalize its interface with thousands of custom skins made by devoted artists — and someone has finally given us a chance to relive this experience in all of its glory.

[...] "The Winamp Skin Museum is an attempt to build a fast, searchable, and shareable, interface for the collection of Winamp Skins amassed on the Internet Archive," says Facebook engineer a Jordan Eldredge, who created the project.

[...] Putting aside the truly incredible volume of skins available, one of my favorite things about the Skin Museum is its live preview user interface that lets you preview each skin as if you've already installed it on Winamp. You can even play the iconic "It really whips the llama's ass" intro by the mysterious DJ Mike Llama.

Needless to say, each skin is available to download if you're feeling like giving Winamp a fresh look.

Winamp Skin Museum.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Facebook to blab bugs it finds if it thinks code owners aren't fixing fast enough:

Facebook has published its first Vulnerability Disclosure Policy and given itself grounds to blab the existence of bugs to the world if it thinks that's the right thing to do.

"Facebook may occasionally find critical security bugs or vulnerabilities in third-party code and systems, including open source software," the company writes. "When that happens, our priority is to see these issues promptly fixed, while making sure that people impacted are informed so that they can protect themselves by deploying a patch or updating their systems."

[...] The company's policy is to contact "the appropriate responsible party" and give them 21 days to respond.

[...] "If we don't hear back within 21 days after reporting, Facebook reserves the right to disclose the vulnerability," the policy says, adding: "If within 90 days after reporting there is no fix or update indicating the issue is being addressed in a reasonable manner, Facebook will disclose the vulnerability."

But the company has also outlined exceptions to those rules, with acceleration of disclosure if a bug is already being exploited and slowing down news "If a project's release cycle dictates a longer window."

Too bad they couldn't code and submit patches.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

From https://micronews.debian.org/:

Debian Academy: a new initiative to define and run an official Debian e-learning platform with Debian specific courses. Do you want to help make it happen? Visit the wiki page and join the team https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAcademy

Following that link brings us to:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAcademy:

The Debian Academy team aims to define and run an official Debian E-Learning platform to create courses about Debian Development topics to learn how to help as contributor, maintainer or developer in a social or in a technical way directly to the Debian Project.

Goals

To have a full own and official Debian E-Learning platform for the Debian Project to create courses about getting involved directly in the Debian Community, to teach about how to help in the development of Debian in different teams and activities like Debian Packaging, Debian tools used for communication in the community (IRC, Mailing Lists), Reproducible Builds, Translations, Video Team, Salsa GitLab, Web, Publicity, Debian Live, Infrastructure and any Debian Development topic related, taking advantage of some existent E-Learning Free Software projects to attract and facilitate to current Debian users interested about to be Debian collaborators and developers with something more than written documentation, using video explanations, creating structured and updated courses about some specific topic, having an index by field, virtual environments to work, examples, exercises and interaction with the instructors, who could be Debian users, collaborators, maintainers or developers who enjoy to teach to others.

To transform or to create some Debian documentation into a Moodle or an edX course format.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Can diamonds burn?:

Diamonds are carbon, just like coal. It takes a bit more to get them burning and keep them burning than coal, but they will burn, as numerous YouTube demonstrations will attest. The trick is to create the right conditions so that a solid diamond can react with the oxygen required to fuel a fire.

[...] When first heated, a diamond will glow red, then white. The heat enables a reaction between the surface of the diamond and the air, converting the carbon to the colorless and odorless gas carbon monoxide (a carbon atom plus an oxygen atom).

"The carbon plus the oxygen to make carbon monoxide generates heat; the carbon monoxide reacting with the oxygen generates more heat; the rising heat causes the carbon monoxide to move away, so more oxygen is brought in," he told Live Science.

[...] That fire, however, will amount to only a glow. Nurturing a flame on the surface of a diamond usually requires an extra boost: 100% oxygen rather than room air, which is only 22% oxygen. This increase in concentration gives the reaction all that it needs to self-perpetuate. The carbon monoxide rising from the diamond ignites in the presence of oxygen, creating a fire that seems to dance on the stone's surface.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Mathematicians Report New Discovery About the Dodecahedron:

Even though mathematicians have spent over 2,000 years dissecting the structure of the five Platonic solids—the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron—there's still a lot we don't know about them.

Now a trio of mathematicians has resolved one of the most basic questions about the dodecahedron.

Suppose you stand at one of the corners of a Platonic solid. Is there some straight path you could take that would eventually return you to your starting point without passing through any of the other corners? For the four Platonic solids built out of squares or equilateral triangles—the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron—mathematicians recentlyfigured out that the answer is no. Any straight path starting from a corner will either hit another corner or wind around forever without returning home. But with the dodecahedron, which is formed from 12 pentagons, mathematicians didn't know what to expect.

Now Jayadev Athreya, David Aulicino and Patrick Hooper have shown that an infinite number of such paths do in fact exist on the dodecahedron. Their paper, published in May in Experimental Mathematics, shows that these paths can be divided into 31 natural families.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

[Ed note: Sometimes stories come in where it is hard to tell whether they should be accepted and put before the community. This story is one of those. It certainly seems interesting, but I quite frankly can't tell whether this is the very start of something big, or a bunch of marketing hype. If it is as capable as claimed, I would expect reference implementations should be readily available for a PC — where are they? So, feel free to tear this to shreds or sing its praises in the comments. --martyb]

TinyML is breathing life into billions of devices:

Until now building machine learning (ML) algorithms for hardware meant complex mathematical modes based on sample data, known as "training data," in order to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so. And if this sounds complex and expensive to build, it is. On top of that, traditionally ML related tasks were translated to the cloud, creating latency, consuming scarce power, and putting machines at the mercy of connection speeds. Combined, these constraints made computing at the Edge slower, more expensive, and less predictable. Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) is the latest embedded software technology that moves hardware into an almost magical realm, where machines can automatically learn and grow through use, like a primitive human brain.

But thanks to recent advances companies are turning to TinyML as the latest trend in building product intelligence. Arduino, the company best known for open-source hardware is making TinyML available for millions of developers, and now together with Edge Impulse, they are turning the ubiquitous Arduino board into a powerful embedded ML platform, like the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and other 32-bit boards. With this partnership you can run powerful learning models based on artificial neural networks (ANN) reaching and sampling tiny sensors along with low powered microcontrollers. Over the past year great strides were made in making deep learning models smaller, faster, and runnable on embedded hardware through projects like TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers, uTensor, and Arm's CMSIS-NN; but building a quality dataset, extracting the right features, training and deploying these models is still complicated. TinyML was the missing link between Edge hardware and device intelligence, now coming to fruition.

The story continues with claims of places where this has apparently been successfully applied. There is a tinyML Foundation web site which continues with prognostications of tremendous growth just ahead.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Attackers are trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday in Cisco gear:

Telecoms and data-center operators take note: attackers are actively trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday vulnerability in Cisco networking devices, the company warned over the weekend.

The security flaw resides in Cisco's iOS XR Software, an operating system for carrier-grade routers and other networking devices used by telecommunications and data-center providers. In an advisory published on Saturday, the networking-gear manufacturer said that a patch is not yet available and provided no timeline for when one would be released.

CVE-2020-3566, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to "cause memory exhaustion, resulting in instability of other processes" including but not limited to interior and exterior routing protocols. Exploits work by sending maliciously crafted Internet Group Management Protocol traffic. Normally, IGMP communications are used by one-to-many networking applications to conserve resources when streaming video and related content. A flaw in the way iOS XR Software queues IGMP packets makes it possible to consume memory resources.

"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted IGMP traffic to an affected device," Saturday's advisory stated. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause memory exhaustion, resulting in instability of other processes. These processes may include, but are not limited to, interior and exterior routing protocols."

[...] The advisory provides indicators that users can check to look for evidence they're under attack. The document says there are no workarounds available to use until a patch can be installed. It does, however, list things administrators can do to mitigate the effects.

Link to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures entry for: CVE-2020-3566.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Could a tree help find a decaying corpse nearby?:

Since 1980, the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center has plumbed the depths of the most macabre of sciences: the decomposition of human bodies. Known colloquially as the Body Farm, here scientists examine how donated cadavers decay, like how the microbiomes inside us go haywire after death. That microbial activity leads to bloat, and—eventually—a body will puncture. Out flows a rank fluid of nutrients, especially nitrogen, for plants on the Body Farm to subsume.

That gave a group of University of Tennessee, Knoxville researchers an idea: what if that blast of nutrients actually changes the color and reflectance of a tree's leaves? And, if so, what if law enforcement authorities could use a drone to scan a forest, looking for these changes to find deceased missing people? Today in the journal Trends in Plant Science, researchers are formally floating the idea—which, to be clear, is still theoretical. The researchers are just beginning to study how a plant's phenotype—its physical characteristics—might change if a human body is composing nearby. "What we're proposing is to use plants as indicators of human decomposition, to hopefully be able to use individual trees within the forest to help pinpoint where someone has died, to help in body recovery," says UT Knoxville plant biologist Neal Stewart, coauthor on the new paper.

Also At ScienceDaily

Journal Reference:
Holly Brabazon, Jennifer M. DeBruyn, Scott C. Lenaghan, et al. Plants to Remotely Detect Human Decomposition? Trends in Plant Science, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2020.07.013

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As reported by https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36016/the-potentially-revolutionary-celera-500l-officially-breaks-cover a possible competitor for the private business jet is now being test flown. It's a pusher-prop plane, but it looks strange due to laminar flow fuselage and very high-aspect-ratio (long, skinny) wings. A high efficiency turbo-diesel engine gives claimed cruise speed of 450 miles/hour (700+kph) at 18-25 miles per US gallon, compare to 2-3 mpg for typical business jets. With this high fuel efficiency, range is 4500 miles and operating costs are projected to be less than 20% of typical small jet. The prototype seats six, similar to other small business aircraft.

Company site at https://www.ottoaviation.com/ says:

Otto Aviation's goal is to create a private aircraft that allows for direct flights between any city pair in the U.S. at speeds and cost comparable to commercial air travel. This takes a complete reinvention of how we fly and an unprecedented look at what private aviation can be.

Think about this, if they succeed, it will undercut the large commercial aircraft companies (which make the equivalent of buses) with the option for a small group to fly privately for about the same cost (like a minivan).

Your AC submitter had the chance to fly private a few times in the past, it is a completely different experience than commercial flight. Starting with free parking at the general aviation terminal we then had a short chat with the receptionist and the pilots. Within 10 minutes we were on the plane and taxiing out for take-off. Not a hint of security and no lines in sight. When we landed at a small airport near our final destination, the rental car was waiting about 50 feet away.

On the flip side, Otto are developing a new airframe and a new engine at the same time--something that, historically, has gone wrong many times in the past.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Under a veil of secrecy, China launched an experimental space plane believed to be an analog to the U.S. X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle on Thursday.

The launch was

from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center using a Long March-2F/T – Chang Zheng-2F/T – launch vehicle. Launch [was] from the LC43/91 launch complex, under a veil of secrecy with no official launch photos or even a launch time disclosed.

Chinese media emitted a laconic report referring, that "the test spacecraft will be in orbit for a period of time before returning to the domestic scheduled landing site. During this period, it will carry out reusable technology verification as planned to provide technical support for the peaceful use of space."

The vehicle may have developed out of China's delta winged Shenlong project.

On December 11, 2007, the Chinese media published an interesting image of a winged spacecraft mounted on a [wing] of [an] H-6K bomber. This was the first public acknowledgment that China was trying to develop a reusable winged space system very similar to the X-37.

Codenamed 'Project 863-706', the Shenlong Project had at the time its first launch scheduled between 2006 and 2010. In fact, Shenlong was possibly a technology development program for the actual space-worthy vehicle.

No further details of the vehicle, activity, or return schedule have been made available.

Original Submission