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DannyB writes:

Now for some amazing fantastical news that we've all been anxiously waiting for . . .

PSA: Microsoft Edge comes to Linux next month

Microsoft has increasingly embraced Linux over the past few years, going so far as to make it easy to run a proper Linux terminal and applications in Windows 10. Now Microsoft is extending another olive branch to the Linux community by offering its new Chromium-powered version of the Edge browser on the OS.

Starting next month, Microsoft will make Edge available on Linux as a developer preview build. Users will be able to download it right from the Edge Insider's site or pick it up from Linux's package manager.

Given Chromium's existing popularity, Edge should, for the most part, work just the same on Linux as on other platforms.

Yes, for the most part, it works the same. Linux users can now rejoice that they will have a Chromium based browser that has the stability, security, robustness, and quality that we've all come to expect from the Microsoft name! Way to go Microsoft!

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Fnord666 writes:

179 arrested in 'Operation DisrupTor' dark web drug takedown:

A massive international law enforcement operation has led to the arrests of 179 dark web drug traffickers who sold opioids and other illicit goods and services across Europe and the US. The investigators part of JCODE, an FBI-led multi—agency Department of Justice initiative, worked with Europol over a period of nine months under the project called Operation DisrupTor.

They started their investigation after authorities took down Wall Street Market in May 2019, leading to the downfall of one of the biggest marketplaces for drugs and counterfeits on the dark web. Wall Street Market served more than 1.15 million customers. According to the Justice Department, law enforcement agencies obtained the intelligence they needed to identify dark web drug traffickers from the Wall Street Market operation. That set off a series of "complementary, but separate" investigations.

Of the 179 arrests, 121 were made in the US, 42 in Germany, eight in the Netherlands, four in the UK, three in Austria and one in Sweden. The DOJ expects more to follow as investigators work on ongoing cases to identify more online drug traffickers. In addition, authorities were also able to seize over $6.5 million in cash and virtual currencies, 63 firearms and 500 kilograms of drugs worldwide. A total of 274 kilos of fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA and medicine containing addictive substances were seized in the US.

Operation DisrupTor

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Fnord666 writes:

A tip from a kid helps detect iOS and Android scam apps' 2.4 million downloads:

Researchers said that a tip from a child led them to discover aggressive adware and exorbitant prices lurking in iOS and Android smartphone apps with a combined 2.4 million downloads from the App Store and Google Play.

Posing as apps for entertainment, wallpaper images, or music downloads, some of the titles served intrusive ads even when an app wasn't active. To prevent users from uninstalling them, the apps hid their icon, making it hard to identify where the ads were coming from. Other apps charged from $2 to $10 and generated revenue of more than $500,000, according to estimates from SensorTower, a smartphone-app intelligence service.

The apps came to light after a girl found a profile on TikTok that was promoting what appeared to be an abusive app and reported it to Be Safe Online, a project in the Czech Republic that educates children about online safety. Acting on the tip, researchers from security firm Avast found 11 apps, for devices running both iOS and Android, that were engaged in similar scams.

Many of the apps were promoted by one of three TikTok users, one of whom had more than 300,000 followers. A user on Instagram was also promoting the apps.

"We thank the young girl who reported the TikTok profile to us," Avast threat analyst Jakub Vávra, said in a statement. "Her awareness and responsible action is the kind of commitment we should all show to make the cyberworld a safer place."

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Fnord666 writes:

Researchers identify new type of superconductor:

Until now, the history of superconducting materials has been a tale of two types: s-wave and d-wave.

Now, Cornell researchers—led by Brad Ramshaw, the Dick & Dale Reis Johnson Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences—have discovered a possible third type: g-wave.

[...] Physicists have theorized the existence of a third type of superconductor between these two so-called "singlet" states: a p-wave superconductor, with one quanta of angular momentum and the electrons pairing with parallel rather than antiparallel spins. This spin-triplet superconductor would be a major breakthrough for quantum computing because it can be used to create Majorana fermions, a unique particle which is its own antiparticle.

For more than 20 years, one of the leading candidates for a p-wave superconductor has been strontium ruthenate (Sr2RuO4), although recent research has started to poke holes in the idea.

Ramshaw and his team set out to determine once and for all whether strontium ruthenate is a highly desired p-wave superconductor. Using high-resolution resonant ultrasound spectroscopy, they discovered that the material is potentially an entirely new kind of superconductor altogether: g-wave.

"This experiment really shows the possibility of this new type of superconductor that we had never thought about before," Ramshaw said. "It really opens up the space of possibilities for what a superconductor can be and how it can manifest itself.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow69:

Experts warn coronavirus may cause 'wave' of neurological conditions including Parkinson's disease - ABC News:

COVID-19 can cause worrying neurological symptoms like a loss of smell and taste, but Australian scientists are warning the damage the virus causes to the brain may also lead to more serious conditions such as Parkinson's disease.

[...] It has happened before.

Five years after the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 1900s, there was up to a three-fold increase in the incidence of Parkinson's disease.

Kevin Barnham from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health said he believed a similar "silent wave" of neurological illness would follow this pandemic.

"Parkinson's disease is a complex illness, but one of the causes is inflammation, and the virus helps to drive that inflammation," he said.

"Once the inflammation gets into the brain, it starts a cascade of events which can ultimately lead to Parkinson's disease.

Researchers outlined their concerns in a study published today in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease.

Fnord666 writes:

This dangerous Android banking trojan is now available online for anyone to use:

The source code for a popular Android banking malware strain has been released online via public forums, raising fears of attacks coming soon.

According to analysts at security firm Kaspersky, the operators of the Cerberus trojan originally attempted to auction off the code to other cybercriminal syndicates, but have now abandoned the material online for anyone to use.

As a result, researchers have witnessed an immediate spike in the number of mobile infections, as cybercriminals harness the complex and sophisticated Android malware to defraud users across Europe.

[...] "We're already seeing an increase in attacks on users since the source code was published. It's not the first time we've seen something like this happen, but this boom of activity since the developers abandoned the project is the biggest developing story we've tracked for a while."

Kaspersky continues to investigate the threat posed by the new edition of Cerberus, but has advised users to take important precautionary measures in the meantime.

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Fnord666 writes:

Pentagon redirected pandemic funds to defense contractors: report:

The Pentagon redirected most of its $1 billion in pandemic funding to defense contractors who exchanged the money for jet engine parts, body armor, dress uniforms and other military needs, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

[...] Congress instructed the $1 billion in the CARES Act to go to Defense Production Act (DPA) efforts, which permits President Trump to direct U.S. companies to manufacture necessary products, such as personal protective equipment (PPE).

Months after the funding was allocated, department lawyers concluded the money could be used for defense production, including projects that had little to do with responding to the pandemic, the Post reported. Smaller firms received more than a third of the funding for less than $5 million, but hundreds of millions of dollars went to several large companies.

At least 10 of the about 30 contractors awarded with DPA funding also received money from the Paycheck Protection Program, the Post found.

Jessica Maxwell, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, told The Hill in a statement that the DPA funding and PPP program are not "in conflict or duplicative."

[...] Defense industry groups said the funding was needed to keep certain contractors in business during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

NASA lays out $28 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon in 2024:

NASA officials released a nearly five-year, $28 billion plan Monday to return astronauts to the surface of the moon before the end of 2024, but the agency's administrator said the "aggressive" timeline set by the Trump administration last year hinges on Congress approving $3.2 billion in the next few months to kick-start development of new human-rated lunar landers.

The plan unveiled Monday contained few new details not previously disclosed by NASA. It assumes crews will launch on NASA's Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, fly to the moon's vicinity on an Orion capsule, then transfer into a commercially-developed lunar lander to ferry the astronauts to and from the lunar surface.

NASA released a new overview document [(pdf)] Monday describing the agency's approach to landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. The program, named Artemis, encompasses the SLS, Orion, Human Landing Systems, and the Gateway, a human-tended platform in lunar orbit that will eventually serve as a staging point for missions to the moon.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A German rocket startup seeks to disrupt the European launch industry:

"For our customers, it's a pain to go to Russia, the United States, or India."

Some space entrepreneurs in Germany believe that the European launch industry—which principally consists of the state-backed Arianespace corporation—is ripe for disruption.

The industry, they say, mirrors that of the United States more than a decade ago, before SpaceX emerged onto the scene and began to disrupt the near-monopoly held by United Launch Alliance. SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, and the company followed that with the Falcon 9 booster less than two years later. Since then, it has forced competitors to innovate and put downward pressure on launch prices.

"Europe is where the US launch industry was 15 years ago," said Daniel Metzler, co-founder and chief executive of the Munich-based Isar Aerospace rocket company, in an interview.

If the company's attitude seems a bit brash, seeking to challenge the existing order of the European launch industry, perhaps it is not surprising given the company's advisors. They are led by Bulent Altan, an aerospace engineer who joined SpaceX in 2004 out of Stanford University. Atlan[sic] played a key role in the development of the avionics system that guided the Falcon 1 and later Falcon 9 rockets in flight. And he spent his pre-college years in Germany.

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Fnord666 writes:

Amazon details its low-bandwidth Sidewalk neighborhood network, coming to Echo and Tile devices soon – TechCrunch:

Last year, Amazon announced its Sidewalk network, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol it developed to help connect smart devices inside and — maybe even more importantly — outside of your home. Sidewalk, which is somewhat akin to a mesh network that, with the right amount of access points, could easily cover a whole neighborhood, is now getting closer to launch.

As Amazon announced today, compatible Echo devices will become Bluetooth bridges for the Sidewalk network later this year, and select Ring Floodlight and Spotlight Cams will also be part of the network. Because these are low-bandwidth connections, Amazon expects that users won't mind sharing a small fraction of their bandwidth with their neighbors.

[...] "Echos are going to serve as bridges, that's going to be a big thing for us," Arana said. "You can imagine the number of customers that will benefit from that feature. And for us to be able to have that kind of service, that's super important. And Tile is going to be the first edge device, the first Sidewalk-enabled device, and they'll be able to track your valuables, your wallet, whatever it is that you love."

And in many ways, that's the promise of Sidewalk. You share a bit of bandwidth with your neighbors and in return, you get the ability to connect to a smart light in your garden that would otherwise be outside of your own network, for example, or get motion sensor alerts even when your home Wi-Fi is out, or to track your lost dog who is wearing a smart pet finder (something Amazon showed off when it first announced Sidewalk).

In today's whitepaper, the team notes that Amazon will make sure that shared bandwidth is capped and provide a simple on/off control for compatible devices to give users the choice to participate. The maximum bandwidth a device can use is capped at 500MB and the bandwidth between a bridge and the Sidewalk server in the cloud won't exceed 80Kbps.

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Fnord666 writes:

This dangeous Firefox glitch can let hackers into your entire network:

Cyberattacks rarely stay in one place. A bad enough exploit can cause a chain reaction that harms one computer after another like falling dominoes. And that's exactly what's at stake with a new glitch discovered in Mozilla Firefox that can put your entire network at risk.

Exploitation of LAN vulnerability found in Firefox for Android

I tested this PoC exploit on 3 devices on same wifi, it worked pretty well.
I was able to open custom URL on every smartphone using vulnerable Firefox (68.11.0 and below) found by @init_string https://t.co/c7EbEaZ6Yx pic.twitter.com/lbQA4qPehq

— Lukas Stefanko (@LukasStefanko) September 18, 2020

The bug was discovered by Australian security researcher Chris Moberly, who found the issue within Firefox's SSDP system. SSDP is used by Firefox to detect other devices on the same network like streaming boxes and external speakers.

But Moberly found something dangerously wrong with SSDP: The system document that stores records of connected devices can be hijacked to execute a command. In a nutshell, this means a hacker could send out malicious files and hijack any device on the same Wi-Fi network. It would be just as easy (and urgent) as opening a link in your browser.

The consequences of this bug are huge, and is another reason why it's never a good idea to use public Wi-Fi.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Sea sponge skeletons inspire stronger, lighter load-bearing structures:

From next-generation body armor to new treatments for tuberculosis, marine sponges have plenty to offer the world of science, and now we're seeing how they might inspire stronger and lighter skyscrapers and bridges. Engineers at Harvard University have demonstrated a new type of load-bearing structure based on the glassy skeletons of these sea creatures, which they say is more than 20 percent stronger than current solutions.

Diagonal lattice architectures are the backbone of typical covered bridges built from light and cheaper materials, making use of tightly arranged diagonal beams to evenly spread the load. Engineers have used this approach since the early 1800s, with the technique also used to support tall buildings and even the metal storage shelves you could find at your local home improvement store. But the Harvard team believes there is room for improvement.

"It gets the job done, but it's not optimal, leading to wasted or redundant material and a cap on how tall we can build," says first author of the study Matheus Fernandes. "One of the main questions driving this research was, can we make these structures more efficient from a material allocation perspective, ultimately using less material to achieve the same strength?"

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle:

Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Its release could conceivably have involved an accident, but the pathogen isn't the mishmash of known viruses that one would expect from something designed in a lab, as a research report in Nature Medicine conclusively lays out. "If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness," the researchers said.

But if genetic engineering wasn't behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world's dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. What's even more worrying is that it no longer takes a sprawling government lab to engineer a virus. Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that could once only have been carried out behind the protected walls of government and corporate labs can now practically be done on the kitchen table with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering—with all its potential for good and bad—has become democratized.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

China to Launch Space Mining Bot:

The possibility of space mining has long captured the imagination and even inspired business ventures. Now, a space startup in China is taking its first steps towards testing capabilities to identify and extract off-Earth resources.

Origin Space, a Beijing-based private space resources company, is set to launch its first 'space mining robot' in November. NEO-1 is a small (around 30 kilograms) satellite intended to enter a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit. It will be launched by a Chinese Long March series rocket as a secondary payload.

This small spacecraft will not be doing actual mining; instead, it will be testing technologies. "The goal is to verify and demonstrate multiple functions such as spacecraft orbital maneuver, simulated small celestial body capture, intelligent spacecraft identification and control," says Yu Tianhong, an Origin Space co-founder.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Should You Trust Apple's New Blood Oxygen Sensor?:

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, it wasn't just face masks and hand sanitizer that flew off drugstore shelves. Pulse oximeters were also in short supply, as news came out that a drop in blood oxygen could be a sign that a case of the coronavirus has taken a bad turn.

These inexpensive and noninvasive electronic devices use LED lights and photodiodes to determine the way red blood cells are absorbing light—oxygenated cells absorb more infrared light than red light, cells that aren't carrying oxygen the opposite. With that information, algorithms can calculate a level of blood oxygenation; for most healthy people that's in the high 90 percentile, in cases of COVID, the numbers dropped into the 80s. So it seemed like a good idea to have one on hand, if you could find one.

[...] accuracy remains a question with many of the pulse oximeters on the consumer market. Says Steve Xu, a physician-engineer who is medical director for the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics at Northwestern University, "It is relatively straightforward to make a pulse oximeter, even for an undergrad engineering design project, but it is really really hard to make a good one that is clinically dependable."

Is Apple's a good one? It's hard to say just yet. Besides the issues of adjusting to different skin colors, coping with motion, and other design challenges faced by all pulse oximeters, putting the sensors on top of the wrist raises the difficulty level. The devices used in hospitals as well as the standalone gadgets sold in drugstores typically clip onto a fingertip or, sometimes, an earlobe.

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