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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/09/27/floating-point-in-the-browser-part-1-impossible-expectations/

A few years ago I did a lot of thinking and writing about floating-point math. It was good fun, and I learned a lot in the process, but sometimes I go a long time without actually using that hard-earned knowledge. So, I am always inordinately pleased when I end up working on a bug which requires some of that specialized knowledge. Here then is the first of (at least) three tales of floating-point bugs that I have investigated in Chromium. This is a short one.

Apparently the official JSON logo?The title of the bug was "JSON Parses 64-bit Integers Incorrectly", which doesn't immediately sound like a floating-point or browser issue, but it was filed in crbug.com and I was asked to take a look. The simplest version of the repro is to open the Chrome developer tools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I) and paste this code into the developer console:

        json = JSON.parse('{"x": 2940078943461317278}'); alert(json['x']);

Pasting unknown code into the console window is a good way to get pwned but this code was simple enough that I could tell that it wasn't malicious. The bug report was nice enough to have included the author's expectations and actual results:

        What is the expected behavior?
        The integer 2940078943461317278 should be returned.
        What went wrong?
        The integer 2940078943461317000 is returned instead.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Hacker Uploads Documents to WHO, UNESCO Websites:

A hacker has found a way to upload PDF files to the websites of several organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNESCO.

The attack, first reported by Cyberwarzone.com, does not appear particularly sophisticated and its impact is likely low, but the same vulnerabilities could have been exploited by more advanced threat actors for more serious attacks.

The files were uploaded by a hacker who uses the online moniker m1gh7yh4ck3r. A search for "m1gh7yh4ck3r" on Google shows that in recent days they uploaded files to official websites of UNESCO, WHO, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Cuban government website.

Georgia Tech and the WHO have apparently removed the files uploaded by the hacker, but the files are still present on the UNESCO and the Cuban government websites at the time of writing.

Reached by SecurityWeek, UNESCO representatives said they will launch an investigation. The WHO and Georgia Tech did not immediately respond to our inquiry.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Russia wants to ban the use of secure protocols such as TLS 1.3, DoH, DoT, ESNI:

The Russian government is working on updating its technology laws so it can ban the use of modern internet protocols that can hinder its surveillance and censorship capabilities.

According to a copy of the proposed law amendments and an explanatory note, the ban targets internet protocols and technologies such as TLS 1.3, DoH, DoT, and ESNI.

Moscow officials aren't looking to ban HTTPS and encrypted communications as a whole, as these are essential to modern-day financial transactions, communications, military, and critical infrastructure.

Instead, the government wants to ban the use of internet protocols that hide "the name (identifier) of a web page" inside HTTPS traffic.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People:

"SINCE COVID-19 MANY AMERICANS FELL BEHIND IN ALL ASPECTS," reads the website copy. The button below this statement is not for a GoFundMe, or a petition for calling for rent relief. Instead, it is the following call to action, from a company called Civvl: "Be hired as eviction crew."

During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can't-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers.

Helena Duncan, a Chicago-based paralegal who also participates in housing activism, saw a Craigslist post from Civvl while searching for jobs. The ad alarmed her.

"It's fucked up that there will be struggling working-class people who will be drawn to gigs like furniture-hauling or process-serving for a company like Civvl, evicting fellow working-class people from their homes so they themselves can make rent," she told Motherboard.

[...] At the time of writing, Civvl and OnQall did not return requests for comment, but did appear to block the author's IP address from visiting OnQall.com.

There is a federal ban on evictions, declared by the CDC, but landlords are still attempting to press on. There is a penalty for violating the ban, which can include a combination of fines and jail time. Civvl did not respond to a question about how the company ensures evictions are legal, though based on the Terms of Service, it appears to pass all risk onto the companies using its platform, stating that it simply "provides lead generation to independent contractors," and does not actually carry out the work itself.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:

A School Ran a Simulation of the Pandemic:

It began, as outbreaks do, with a spark. Three infections, of which two patients soon began showing symptoms. But by the time the coughing and fevers arrived, it was already too late. The virus had spread before its unfortunate hosts even appeared sick. And from there it moved quickly and quietly, multiplying faster through the population than teams of doctors and scientists could quell it.

[...] The "pandemic" was the culmination of a two-week course at a charter school called Sarasota Military Academy Prep. The organizers had seeded the digital virus via smartphone app, where it spread from student to student through Bluetooth signals. Todd Brown, the school's outreach director and a longtime teacher there, had created the school's pandemic simulation in 2016 as a way to teach a lesson in governance. Kids would act as epidemiologists, clinicians, the citizenry, the press, the military, and the government, racing to understand a novel virus and stop the plague while keeping as many people as possible safe and healthy. Plenty of civic lessons would be sure to ensue

[...] So how did the students do back in December 2019, when their teachers launched them on their alarmingly prescient challenge? The students were far better at social distancing than during past simulations—asymptomatic spread made it a grim necessity—and the triage between government officials, scientists, and doctors looked promising, Brown says. Still, they didn't find a vaccine, and the death rate was about 35 percent. That wasn't particularly bad, at least in simulation terms, Brown says; there was that one year when essentially everybody died. But to their teachers, it wasn't really the students' performance that mattered. It was their experience. Next time, they'd be readier, even if next time came sooner than anyone expected.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Evolution of radio-resistance is more complicated than previously thought:

The toughest organisms on Earth, called extremophiles, can survive extreme conditions like extreme dryness (desiccation), extreme cold, space vacuum, acid, or even high-level radiation. So far, the toughest of all seems to be the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans—able to survive doses of radiation a thousand times greater than those fatal to humans. But to this date, scientists remained puzzled by how radio-resistance could have evolved in several organisms on our planet, naturally protected from solar radiation by its magnetic field. While some scientists suggest that radio-resistance in extremophile organisms could have evolved along with other kinds of resistance, such as resistance to desiccation, a question remained: which genes are specifically involved in radio-resistance?

Journal Reference:
Steven T. Bruckbauer, Joel Martin, Benjamin B. Minkoff, et al. Physiology of Highly Radioresistant Escherichia coli After Experimental Evolution for 100 Cycles of Selection, Frontiers in Microbiology (DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2020.582590)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

The Arctic is burning in a whole new way:

"Zombie fires" and burning of fire-resistant vegetation are new features driving Arctic fires—with strong consequences for the global climate—warn international fire scientists in a commentary published in Nature Geoscience.

The 2020 Arctic wildfire season began two months early and was unprecedented in scope.

"It's not just the amount of burned area that is alarming," said Dr. Merritt Turetsky, a coauthor of the study who is a fire and permafrost ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. "There are other trends we noticed in the satellite data that tell us how the Arctic fire regime is changing and what this spells for our climate future."

[...] The commentary identifies two new features of recent Arctic fires. The first is the prevalence of holdover fires, also called zombie fires. Fire from a previous growing season can smolder in carbon-rich peat underground over the winter, then re-ignite on the surface as soon as the weather warms in spring.

[...] The second feature is the new occurrence of fire in fire-resistant landscapes. As tundra in the far north becomes hotter and drier under the influence of a warmer climate, vegetation types not typically thought of as fuels are starting to catch fire: dwarf shrubs, sedges, grass, moss, even surface peats. Wet landscapes like bogs, fens, and marshes are also becoming vulnerable to burning.

Journal Reference:
Jessica L. McCarty, Thomas E. L. Smith, Merritt R. Turetsky. Arctic fires re-emerging, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-00645-5)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Alphabet, shareholders settle in lawsuits over sexual harassment at Google:

Investors sued after one exec accused of misconduct was compensated $240M to leave.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, said today it has settled a set of shareholder lawsuits related to the company's handling of sexual harassment claims. Alphabet will commit $310 million to corporate diversity programs over the next decade, and the company agreed to allow its board to take on a greater oversight role in misconduct cases.

As part of the new agreement, Alphabet will expand on its current policy of "prohibiting severance for anyone terminated for any form of misconduct," to include anyone who is currently under investigation for "sexual misconduct or retaliation," Google VP of People Operations Eileen Naughton said in a company blog post.

[...] The lawsuits followed reports finding that three top Google executives who left the company amid allegations of misconduct got to leave quietly with massive compensation packages. Android creator Andy Rubin was given a $150 million stock grant, as well as a $90 million severance package, when he was ushered out of the company in 2014 after Google determined a sexual misconduct complaint against him was credible.

See also: The New York Times.

Makes Google's "Do no evil." mantra of the past, seem quaint.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Breakthrough Could Lead to Amplifiers for 6G Signals

With 5G just rolling out and destined to take years to mature, it might seem odd to worry about 6G. But some engineers say that this is the perfect time to worry about it. One group, based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been developing a device that could be critical to efficiently pushing 6G's terahertz-frequency signals out of the antennas of future smartphones and other connected devices. They reported key aspects of the device—including an "n-polar" gallium nitride high-electron mobility transistor—in two papers that recently appeared in IEEE Electron Device Letters.

Testing so far has focused on 94 gigahertz frequencies, which are at the edge of terahertz. "We have just broken through records of millimeter-wave operation by factors which are just stunning," says Umesh K. Mishra, an IEEE Fellow who heads the UCSB group that published the papers. "If you're in the device field, if you improve things by 20 percent people are happy. Here, we have improved things by 200 to 300 percent."

Journal References:
Wenjian Liu, Islam Sayed, Brian Romanczyk, et al. Ru/N-Polar GaN Schottky Diode With Less Than 2 μA/cm² Reverse Current - IEEE Journals & Magazine, (DOI: 10.1109/LED.2020.3014524)
Brian Romanczyk, Weiyi Li, Matthew Guidry, et al. N-polar GaN-on-Sapphire Deep Recess HEMTs with High W-Band Power Density - IEEE Journals & Magazine, (DOI: 10.1109/LED.2020.3022401)

Related: FCC Will Allow Wireless Devices to Operate in the 95 GHz to 3 THz Range
Atom-Thin Switches Could Route 5G, and Even 6G Radio Signals
Samsung's 6G White Paper: Available by 2030, 1,000 Gbps Peak Speed, 1 Gbps "User Experienced" Speed
Scientists Build Ultra-High-Speed Terahertz Wireless Chip

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NVIDIA's Official Response On GeForce RTX 30 Series Issues: SP-CAP vs MLCC Groupings Vary Depending on Design & Not Indicative of Quality

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series has been caught up in a major controversy ever since the lineup launched. A botched launch for both RTX 3080 & RTX 3090 graphics cards was soon followed by user reports where several cards were crashing during gaming. It was soon highlighted that the cause of these issues could be related to the GPUs boosting algorithm but more recent reports suggest that the issue could have more to do with the hardware design that AIB[*] partners have implemented on their custom products. NVIDIA has now come forward with an official statement regarding the matter.

[...] In the statement, NVIDIA specifically states that their partner cards are based on custom designs and that they work very closely with them during the whole design/test process. NVIDIA does give AIBs reference specs to follow and gives them certain guidelines for designing customized boards. That does include the limits defined for voltages, power, and clock speeds. NVIDIA goes on to state that there's no specific SP-CAP / MLCC grouping that can be defined for all cards since AIB designs vary compared to each other. But NVIDIA also states that the number of SP-CAP / MLCC groupings are also not indicative of quality.

[...] In our previous report, it was pointed that the GeForce RTX 30 series generally crashed when it hits a certain boost clock above 2.0 GHz. Some users also found out that cards with full SP-CAP layouts (Conductive Polymer Tantalum Solid Capacitors) were generating more issues compared to boards that either use a combination of SP-CAP / MLCCs (Multilayer Ceramic Chip Capacitor) or an entire MLCC design.

[*] AIB: "Add In Board". Cf: Terminology: All graphics cards are AIB.

See also: EVGA Says Nvidia RTX 3080 Cap Issues Caused Crashes, Confirms Stability Issues

Previously: Nvidia Announces RTX 30-Series "Ampere" GPUs

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Nikola founder bought truck designs from third party:

The original design for Nikola's flagship truck was purchased by founder Trevor Milton from a designer in Croatia, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, despite company claims in a 2018 lawsuit that the vehicle was initially designed by Mr. Milton "in his basement.."

The truck, the Nikola One, is at the centre of a $2 billion lawsuit with Tesla, in which Nikola alleges its rival infringed on its patents. Nikola claims in that lawsuit that Mr. Milton began designing the model in 2013, with other company staff later working on it.

In a rebuttal to the lawsuit filed last week, Tesla alleged that Nikola could not protect the designs because they did not originate from the company itself, but from Adriano Mudri, a designer based in Croatia.

The arstechnica article didn't include any links.

Nikola Founder Bought Truck Design From Designer's College Portfolio: Report:

And Nikola's sub-contracture allegedly doesn't end with technology, as a Financial Times report alleges even Nikola's design for the hydrogen-powered One semi-truck was outsourced from Croatia.

Previously:
Nikola Stock Plunges 26% after Fraud Claims Complicate Hydrogen Plans
New Report Claims Widespread Deception by Nikola Motor and Founder Trevor Milton
Nikola Motors Opening Reservations for Badger Electric Pickup Truck on June 27
Nikola Semi Startup Shines on Wall Street With $34BN Valuation

At this point, Nikola's business plan seems to be resembling the movie The Producers business plan more than anything.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Trump's Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance:

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times's findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Scientists Have Found The Molecule That Allows Bacteria to 'Exhale' Electricity:

For mouthless, lungless bacteria, breathing is a bit more complicated than it is for humans.

We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; Geobacter - a ubiquitous, groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria - swallow up organic waste and 'exhale' electrons, generating a tiny electric current in the process.

[...] Using advanced microscopy techniques, the researchers have uncovered the "secret molecule" that allows Geobacter to breathe over tremendously long distances previously unseen in bacteria.

The team also found that, by stimulating colonies of Geobacter with an electric field, the microbes conducted electricity 1,000 times more efficiently than they do in their natural environment.

Understanding these innate, electrical adaptations could be a crucial step in transforming Geobacter colonies into living, breathing batteries, the researchers said.

Journal Reference:
Scientists Have Found The Molecule That Allows Bacteria to 'Exhale' Electricity, (DOI: https://www.sciencealert.com/bacteria-in-mud-breathe-through-giant-snorkels-that-conduct-electricity)

Previously:
Electric Bacteria Create Currents Out of Thin - and Thick - Air
Electroactive Bacteria Can be Found All Over the Planet
Synthetic Biological Protein Nanowires with High Conductivity
Electric Life Forms that Live on Pure Energy/p>

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

HOTorNOT: The forgotten website that shaped the internet:

Created on a lark in 2000, HOTorNOT became what we'd now call an overnight viral hit by letting people upload pictures of themselves to the internet so total strangers could rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. Twenty years later, it's a conceit that smacks of the juvenile "edginess" of the early web. It's now seen at best as superficial and crass, at worst as problematic and potentially offensive. However, the deeper you dive into HOTorNOT's history, the more surprised you'll be by the thoughtfulness bubbling below its shallow surface — and its fundamental impact on internet history.

In ways big and small, HOTorNOT's DNA is embedded into almost every major platform that defines how we interact online today.

It was the genesis for revolutionary concepts like the public profile at a time when uploading pictures of yourself was seen as an oddity or risk, when Facebook wasn't even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye. Sure, we may have gotten rid of the 1 to 10 rating scale, but likes on Instagram selfies still essentially serve as an implied aggregated score of exactly how hot or not the internet thinks you are.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Why do we sleep? The answer may change right before we turn 3.:

Humans spend about a third of our lives sleeping, and scientists have long debated why slumber takes up such a huge slice of our time. Now, a new study hints that our main reason for sleeping starts off as one thing, then changes at a surprisingly specific age.

Two leading theories as to why we sleep focus on the brain: One theory says that the brain uses sleep to reorganize the connections between its cells, building electrical networks that support our memory and ability to learn; the other theory says that the brain needs time to clean up the metabolic waste that accumulates throughout the day. Neuroscientists have quibbled over which of these functions is the main reason for sleep, but the new study reveals that the answer may be different for babies and adults.

In the study, published Sep. 18 in the journal Science Advances, researchers use a mathematical model to show that infants spend most of their sleeping hours in "deep sleep," also known as random[sic] eye movement (REM)[*] sleep, while their brains rapidly build new connections between cells and grow ever larger. Then, just before toddlers reach age 2-and-a-half, their amount of REM sleep dips dramatically as the brain switches into maintenance mode, mostly using sleep time for cleaning and repair.