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DeathMonkey writes:

U.S. Admits That Congressman Offered Pardon to Assange If He Covered Up Russia Links

Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange's extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a Congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia's involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer, told the court that she had attended a meeting between Assange, then Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and pro-Trump troll Charles Johnson at Assange's hide-out, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on August 15, 2017.

Robinson said the two Americans claimed to be emissaries from Washington and "wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president." The pair allegedly told Assange that they could help grant him a pardon in exchange for him revealing information about the source of the WikiLeaks information that proved it was not the Russians who hacked Democratic emails.

"They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.," Robinson said.

After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim. They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.

Additional coverage at Reuters,The Guardian, The BBC, and others.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Once again, supermarkets are enhancing the customer experience by engaging automation to replace humans. Since the COVID pandemic started many stores have had to count how many people enter and leave the store. Woolworths will introduce customer counting devices to do this task instead of human staff, taking care to avoid the debacle experienced by the TSA by storing the images as blocks to ensure a level of privacy is afforded customers.

Can I apply for a job to be a machine?

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takyon writes:

Arm Officially Supports Panfrost Open-Source Mali GPU Driver Development

Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide a particular bug is not important to them, so you'd be out of luck.

So the developer community has long tried to reverse-engineer GPU drivers with projects like Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), Etnaviv (Vivante), as well as Lima and Panfrost for Arm Mali GPUs. Several years ago, Arm management was not interested at all collaborating with open-source GPU driver development for Mali GPUs, but as noted by Phoronix, Alyssa Rosenzweig, a graphics software engineer employed by Collabora, explained Panfrost development was now done in partnership with Arm during a talk at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2020).

[...] So that means a stable Panfrost driver should be expected quite earlier, and possibly with higher quality, than if the company still had to spend time and resources on reverse-engineering.

Related: Pagamigo: FOSS Python Script for PayPal Payments (Alyssa Rosenzweig)
Nvidia Announces $40 Billion Acquisition of Arm Holdings
Nvidia-Branded ARM CPUs; UK Trade Union Speaks Out Against Deal

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Billions of devices vulnerable to new 'BLESA' Bluetooth security flaw:

Billions of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and IoT devices are using Bluetooth software stacks that are vulnerable to a new security flaw disclosed over the summer.

Named BLESA (Bluetooth Low Energy Spoofing Attack), the vulnerability impacts devices running the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol.

[...] In a research project at Purdue University, a team of seven academics set out to investigate a section of the BLE protocol that plays a crucial role in day-to-day BLE operations but has rarely been analyzed for security issues.

Their work focused on the "reconnection" process. This operation takes place after two BLE devices (the client and server) have authenticated each other during the pairing operation.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Chinese pharma leak infects thousands with bacterial disease - National:

Thousands of people in northwestern China have tested positive for brucellosis, a disease that commonly infects livestock, after a pharmaceutical factory accidentally vented bacteria into the air last year, officials say.

At least 3,245 people have contracted the disease in Lazhou, the capital of Gansu province, according to a statement from the city's health commission. More than 1,000 are suspected to have the disease. No fatalities have been reported since the problem was first identified last November.

The latest numbers are much higher than initially thought, the state-run Global Times reports.

Authorities have traced the leak back to the Zhongmu Lanzhou biological pharmaceutical factory, which was found to be using expired sanitizers and disinfectants. The factory accidentally vented an aerosolized version of Brucella, the bacteria that causes brucellosis, into the air last summer, causing it to spread across the surrounding area through the wind.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Tor 0day: Finding IP Addresses - The Hacker Factor Blog:

Last February, my Tor onion service came under a huge Tor-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. I spent days analyzing the attack, developing mitigation options, and defending my server. (The Tor service that I run for the Internet Archive was down for a few hours, but I managed to keep it up and running through most of the attack.)

While trying to find creative ways to keep the service up, I consulted a group of friends who are very active in the network incident response field. Some of these are the people who warn the world about new network attacks. Others are very experienced at tracking down denial-of-service attacks and their associated command-and-control (C&C) servers. I asked them if they could help me find the source of the attack. "Sure," they replied. They just needed my IP address.

I read off the address: "152 dot" and they repeated back "152 dot". "19 dot" "19 dot" and then they told me the rest of the network address. (I was stunned.) Tor is supposed to be anonymous. You're not supposed to know the IP address of a hidden service. But they knew. They had been watching the Tor-based DDoS. They had a list of the hidden service addresses that were being targeted by the attack. They just didn't know that this specific address was mine.

As it turns out, this is an open secret among the internet service community: You are not anonymous on Tor.

It turns out that there are some flaws in the design of Tor services, which this story very ably explains. Quite readable, too.

[NB: SoylentNews has supported Tor Since April 1, 2014 (yes, really). In light of today's story, is this something that SoylentNews should continue to support? I suspect bots are making use of it to create accounts here. It would probably require some work to disable Tor properly, so I am not anticipating immediate removal. This is more trying to get input from the community. What say you? --martyb]

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DannyB writes:

German Hospital Hacked, Patient Taken to Another City Dies:

German authorities said Thursday that what appears to have been a misdirected hacker attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

The Duesseldorf University Clinic's systems have been disrupted since last Thursday. The hospital said investigators have found that the source of the problem was a hacker attack on a weak spot in "widely used commercial add-on software," which it didn't identify.

As a consequence, systems gradually crashed and the hospital wasn't able to access data; emergency patients were taken elsewhere and operations postponed.

The hospital said that that "there was no concrete ransom demand." It added that there are no indications that data is irretrievably lost and that its IT systems are being gradually restarted.

Also at Ars Technica.

What should happen if the hackers are caught?

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/its-now-possible-to-detect-counterfeit-whisky-without-opening-the-bottle/

There's nothing quite like the pleasure of sipping a fine Scotch whisky, for those whose tastes run to such indulgences. But how can you be sure that you're paying for the real deal and not some cheap counterfeit? Good news: physicists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have figured out how to test the authenticity of bottles of fine Scotch whisky using laser light, without ever having to open the bottles. They described their work in a recent paper published in the journal Analytical Methods.

[...] A 2018 study subjected 55 randomly selected bottles from auctions, private collectors, and retailers to radiocarbon dating and found that 21 of them were either outright fakes or not distilled in the year claimed on the label.

[...] Food scientists and chemists are also interested in using spectroscopy to identify the chemical compounds inside a whisky bottle. This involves shining a laser light into a substance, which scatters the light and breaks it into a spectrum of wavelengths.

[...] The challenge in applying such techniques to whisky is that the glass bottles themselves produce a large spectral signal, making it difficult to discern the chemical fingerprint of interest (that of the spirit inside). So spectroscopy is usually performed after whiskies have been removed from the bottle.

[The researchers] figured out how to shape the laser light into a ring instead of a focused beam, thereby suppressing the noisy signal from the glass.

Journal Reference:
Holly Fleming, Mingzhou Chen, Graham D. Bruce, et al. Through-bottle whisky sensing and classification using Raman spectroscopy in an axicon-based backscattering configuration [open], Analytical Methods (DOI: 10.1039/D0AY01101K)

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Freeman writes:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/international-computing-curriculum-metrecc-research-seminar/

Around the world, formal education systems are bringing computing knowledge to learners. But what exactly is set down in different countries' computing curricula, and what are classroom educators teaching? This was the topic of the first in the autumn series of our Raspberry Pi research seminars on Tuesday 8 September.

[...] Examples of mismatches include lower numbers of primary school teachers reporting that they taught visual or symbolic programming, even though the topic did appear on their curriculum.

A table listing computer science topics.

This table shows computer science topic the METRECC tool asks teachers about, and what percentage of respondents in the pilot study stated that they teach these to their students.

[...] If you missed the seminar, you can find the presentation slides and a recording of the researchers' talk on our seminars page.

In our next seminar on Tuesday 6 October at 17:00–18:30 BST / 12:00–13:30 EDT / 9:00–10:30 PT / 18:00–19:30 CEST, we'll welcome Shuchi Grover, a prominent researcher in the area of computational thinking and formative assessment. The title of Shuchi's seminar is Assessments to improve student learning in introductory CS classrooms.

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takyon writes:

Military Police Leaders Weighed Deploying 'Heat Ray' Against D.C. Protesters

Hours before federal police officers cleared a crowded park near the White House with smoke and tear gas on June 1, the lead military police officer in the Department of Defense for the D.C. region asked if the D.C. National Guard had a kind of military heat ray that might be deployed against demonstrators in the nation's capital, according to one of the most senior National Guard officers on the scene.

In written responses to the House Committee on Natural Resources obtained by NPR, Major Adam DeMarco of the D.C. National Guard said he was copied on an email from the Provost Marshal of Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region. He was looking for two things: a long range acoustic device, a kind of sound cannon known as an LRAD, and a device called the Active Denial System, or ADS.

The ADS was developed by the military some twenty years ago as a way to disperse crowds. There have been questions about whether it worked, or should be deployed in the first place. It uses millimeter wave technology to essentially heat the skin of people targeted by its invisible ray.

Long Range Acoustic Device
Active Denial System.

Related: Police Could Soon Get Their Hands on the U.S. Military's 'Pain Ray' (2013)
U.S. Military Increasing Development of Directed Energy Weapons

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canopic jug writes:

Techdirt covers the graffitti artist Banksy's loss of a trademark suit against a greeting card company, over one of his more famous defacements. Techdirt describes it as a weak-ass attempt to abuse trademark law:

Nearly a year ago we wrote about the somewhat complex (and misunderstood by many) trademark dispute involving Banksy. There is a lot of background here, so I'm going to try to go with the abbreviated version. Banksy -- who has claimed that "copyright is for losers" -- has always refused to copyright his random graffiti-based art. However, as it now becomes clear, one reason he's avoided using copyright is because to register the work, he'd likely have to reveal his real name. Instead, it appears he's spent a few years abusing trademark law to try to trademark some of his artwork, including his famous "flower bomber" image, which was registered to a company called Pest Control Office Limited. Of course, to get a trademark, you have to use it in commerce, and many Banksy creations don't fit that criteria.

On the same case, an article which appear to intentionally confuse trademarks and copyrights and use them interchangably, The Telegraph writes that the graffittist lost trademark over one of his more famous works. While the judge in this case has insinuated that copyright might not apply to graffitti, Banksy's attempt to use of trademark to prevent commercialization of his graffitti has been upended:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

We found out who makes Walmart's new Gateway laptops, and it's bad news:

Back in 2007, Taiwan-based PC manufacturer Acer bought the once-iconic Gateway brand in order to stick a thumb in the eye of rival OEM Lenovo and increase its US market presence. In the 13 years since, the Gateway brand has languished largely unused, while Acer built up its own name in the United States directly. The cow is officially back now, though, with a new line of mostly budget, Walmart-exclusive Gateway laptops.

[...] In June of this year, we reviewed and absolutely despised a $140 EVOO laptop—a device powered by an AMD A4-9120e CPU, just like the cheapest model of Gateway laptop in the table above. The new GWTN116-1BL has twice the RAM and storage compared to the effectively uncooled, drastically underclocked, and absolutely bletcherous EVOO EV-C-116-5—but when we went sleuthing, we discovered shipping records indicating that it, too, is an EVOO system.

More accurately, EVOO imports devices made by Shenzhen Bmorn Technology, a Chinese national brand. We found US Customs records of EVOO importing from Bmorn, with devices under both the Gateway brand and EVOO's own inside the same shipment.

An Acer representative confirmed later that, although Acer does own the Gateway brand, it is not directly involved in the production or manufacture of these devices.

[...] We've heard people say decent things about EVOO's higher-end laptops, so it's possible that some of these will turn out to be a good deal. We intend to test and review at least one of them here soon—but in the meantime, we'd advise some caution with the new "Gateway" brand.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

High-tech UK-US ship launched on 400th Mayflower anniversary:

With a splash of Plymouth gin, the U.S. ambassador to Britain officially launched a ship named Mayflower on Wednesday, 400 years to the day after a wooden vessel with that name sailed from an English port and changed the history of two continents.

Unlike the merchant ship that carried a group of European Puritan settlers to a new life across the Atlantic Ocean in 1620, the Mayflower christened by U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood Johnson has no crew or passengers. It will cross the sea powered by sun and wind, and steered by artificial intelligence.

Johnson said the high-tech ship, developed jointly by U.K.-based marine research organization ProMare and U.S. tech giant IBM, showed that "the pioneering spirit of the Mayflower really lives on" in the trans-Atlantic partnership.

[...] The Mayflower Autonomous Ship — its creators decided against a snappier name — is intended to be the first in a new generation of crewless high-tech vessels that can explore parts of oceans too difficult or dangerous for people to reach.

[...] The 50-foot (15-meter) trimaran will undertake six months of sea trials and short trips before setting out on its trans-Atlantic trip to measure ocean health: assessing the impact of climate change, measuring micro-plastic pollution and studying populations of whales and dolphins.

Along the way, its AI captain will have to make complex decisions in response to wind, waves, vessels and unknown surprises.

"We're quietly confident we're going to make it," Stanford-Clark said. "Ultimately, the sea will decide."

Related:
Groundbreaking Mayflower Autonomous Ship revealed to the world
Mayflower Autonomous Ship Launches
An unmanned voyage in the wake of the Mayflower

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Google Drive outages reported across the US:

Google Drive appeared to experience a widespread service disruption on Tuesday, with people reporting outages and other issues across the US. The issue has now been resolved, but not before people took to social media to vent frustration about  Google Drive going down amid remote work and learning.

[...] People began reporting trouble with Google Drive around 6:45 a.m. PT, according to outage monitoring site DownDetector. While some said they were getting error messages, others reported that Google Drive wasn't loading at all. Those affected also took to Twitter to vent frustration over the outage, with some noting that it was disrupting virtual learning. Many people are relying on Google Drive and other services to help with remote work and schooling amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Any Soylentils impacted by this outage and if so, how long did it last for you? Do you use Google Docs at your place of employment or at school?

Additional coverage at BleepingComputer and Post Register.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Solar cycle 25 is here. NASA, NOAA scientists explain what that means:

Solar Cycle 25 has begun. During a media event on Tuesday, experts from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) discussed their analysis and predictions about the new solar cycle – and how the coming upswing in space weather will impact our lives and technology on Earth, as well as astronauts in space.

The Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, an international group of experts co-sponsored by NASA and NOAA, announced that solar minimum occurred in December 2019, marking the start of a new solar cycle. Because our Sun is so variable, it can take months after the fact to declare this event. Scientists use sunspots to track solar cycle progress; the dark blotches on the Sun are associated with solar activity, often as the origins for giant explosions – such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections – which can spew light, energy, and solar material into space.

"As we emerge from solar minimum and approach Cycle 25's maximum, it is important to remember solar activity never stops; it changes form as the pendulum swings," said Lika Guhathakurta, solar scientist at the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA and NOAA, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies and departments, work together on the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan to enhance space weather preparedness and protect the nation from space weather hazards. NOAA provides space weather predictions and satellites to monitor space weather in real time; NASA is the nation's research arm, helping improve our understanding of near-Earth space, and ultimately, forecasting models.

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