SoylentNews

GitHub Revamps Copyright Takedown Policy After Restoring YouTube-dl

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

GitHub revamps copyright takedown policy after restoring YouTube-dl:

The source code for YouTube-dl, a tool you can use to download videos from YouTube, is back up on GitHub after the code repository took it down in October following a DMCA complaint from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Citing a letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), GitHub says it ultimately found that the RIAA's complaint didn't have any merit.

[...]

This is the best possible outcome of the RIAA's attack on youtube-dl. Good on @GitHub for standing up for developers against DMCA § 1201 abuses.

The @EFF did amazing work representing the project, and you should read their letter: https://t.co/Whh0cKTgIFhttps://t.co/BT1aovWZx7

— Filippo Valsorda 💚🤍❤️ ✊ (@FiloSottile) November 16, 2020

If there's a silver lining to the episode, it's that GitHub is implementing new policies to avoid a repeat of a repeat situation moving forward. [...]

GitHub is also establishing a $1 million defense fund to provide legal aid to developers against suspect section 1201 claims, as well as doubling down on its lobbying work to amend the DMCA and other similar copyright laws across the world.

cosurgi writes:

From the Abstract:

Roger Penrose proposed that a spatial quantum superposition collapses as a back-reaction from spacetime, which is curved in different ways by each branch of the superposition. In this sense, one speaks of gravity-related wave function collapse. He also provided a heuristic formula to compute the decay time of the superposition—similar to that suggested earlier by Lajos Diósi, hence the name Diósi–Penrose model. The collapse depends on the effective size of the mass density of particles in the superposition, and is random: this randomness shows up as a diffusion of the particles' motion, resulting, if charged, in the emission of radiation. Here, we compute the radiation emission rate, which is faint but detectable. We then report the results of a dedicated experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory to measure this radiation emission rate. Our result sets a lower bound on the effective size of the mass density of nuclei, which is about three orders of magnitude larger than previous bounds. This rules out the natural parameter-free version of the Diósi–Penrose model.

Journal Reference:
Sandro Donadi, Kristian Piscicchia, Catalina Curceanu, et al. Underground test of gravity-related wave function collapse, Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-1008-4)

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Our Milky Way's Biggest Collision Was With The 'Kraken Galaxy' Not The 'Gaia Sausage,' Say Scientists

The first complete family tree of our home galaxy has been reconstructed by an international team of astrophysicists. They used artificial intelligence to decipher the movements of the 150 globular clusters that orbit the Milky Way.

In doing so they're uncovered a massive collision billions of years ago between our galaxy and what they've dubbed the "Kraken" galaxy, an event that added millions of stars to the Milky Way.

It's thought that globular clusters—dense clumps of stars older than most in the Milky Way and related to each other—are the leftovers of galaxies that merged to form our galaxy. Scientists have known for some time that galaxies can grow by the merging of smaller galaxies, but until now little has been known about how the Milky Way came to be.

[...] Using globular clusters as "fossils" to reconstruct the early assembly histories of galaxies, the researchers developed an AI suite of advanced computer simulations called E-MOSAICS that show how globular clusters form, evolve, and are destroyed.

"The main challenge of connecting the properties of globular clusters to the merger history of their host galaxy has always been that galaxy assembly is an extremely messy process, during which the orbits of the globular clusters are completely reshuffled," said Dr Diederik Kruijssen at the Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg (ZAH) in Germany.

Cue a new an artificial neural network. "We tested the algorithm tens of thousands of times on the simulations and we were amazed at how accurately it was able to reconstruct the merger histories of the simulated galaxies, using only their globular cluster populations," said Kruijssen.

Here's the simulation of the mergers with globular clusters that shaped the Milky Way of today.

Ah, yes, TFSA is available in full: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa2452

Original Submission

hubie writes:

For many, one of the early signs that they are transitioning in life from a codger to an old codger is the onset of presbyopia. This is also known as "farsightedness" and is caused by loss of elasticity of the lens of the eye. Children can typically handle vision of 10 D or smaller, which is to say they can focus from infinity down to 10 cm away or less from their face. However, as a person ages that minimum distance increases until they get into their 50s and realize their arms are too short to hold their book any longer. Typical corrections are bifocal or progressive spectacles, as well as multifocal contact lenses and intra-ocular lenses. There are inherent trade-offs in all of these solutions, such as trading near or far vision enhancement at the expense of image contrast.

As reported in a Nature Scientific Report paper, researchers from Spain have built a "smart glasses"-style real-time prototype presbyopia correction system:

The approach introduced in this paper is non-invasive and also offers a dynamic continuous focus range solution as in the natural lens. By using tunable opto-electronics lenses, it is possible to provide a focusing range only limited by the digital-to-analog converter of the system, in addition to the maximum and minimum focal length physically achievable by the opto-electronics lenses. In our prototype, a real-time pupil tracking system running on a smartphone is used to dynamically control the optical power required in the opto-electronics lenses. Providing a smooth and comfortable visual experience to the subject requires relatively fast changes in the applied power, therefore, a heavily integrated and computationally efficient system is essential to properly drive this Dynamic Auto-Accommodation Glasses.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Frequent, rapid testing could cripple COVID-19 within weeks, study shows: Research shows test turnaround-time, frequency far more important than sensitivity in curbing spread:

Testing half the population weekly with inexpensive, rapid-turnaround COVID-19 tests would drive the virus toward elimination within weeks—even if those tests are significantly less sensitive than gold-standard clinical tests, according to a new study published today by CU Boulder and Harvard University researchers.

Such a strategy could lead to "personalized stay-at-home orders" without shutting down restaurants, bars, retail stores and schools, the authors said.

"Our big picture finding is that, when it comes to public health, it's better to have a less sensitive test with results today than a more sensitive one with results tomorrow," said lead author Daniel Larremore, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder. "Rather than telling everyone to stay home so you can be sure that one person who is sick doesn't spread it, we could give only the contagious people stay-at-home orders so everyone else can go about their lives."

[...] They then used mathematical modeling to forecast the impact of screening with different kinds of tests on three hypothetical scenarios: in 10,000 individuals; in a university-type setting of 20,000 people; and in a city of 8.4 million.

[...] When it came to curbing spread, they found that frequency and turnaround time are much more important than test sensitivity.

For instance, in one scenario in a large city, widespread twice-weekly testing with a rapid but less sensitive test reduced the degree of infectiousness, or R0 ("R naught"), of the virus by 80%. But twice-weekly testing with a more sensitive PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, which takes up to 48 hours to return results, reduced infectiousness by only 58%. When the amount of testing was the same, the rapid test always reduced infectiousness better than the slower, more sensitive PCR test.

That's because about two-thirds of infected people have no symptoms and as they await their results, they continue to spread the virus.

"This paper is one of the first to show we should worry less about test sensitivity and, when it comes to public health, prioritize frequency and turnaround," said senior co-author Roy Parker, director of the BioFrontiers Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Journal Reference:
Daniel B. Larremore, Bryan Wilder, Evan Lester, [et al]. Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 screening. Science Advances, Nov. 20, 2020; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd5393

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Star Wars novelist says Disney won't pay him royalties it owes him:

Alan Dean Foster, author of several Star Wars novelizations, says Disney hasn't paid him his royalties. According to Foster, Disney has asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement before the company will speak with him. According to SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal, Disney is arguing that when it bought Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, they bought contract rights — but not the legal obligation to pay Foster for his work.

[...] Foster ghost-wrote the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope, under the byline of George Lucas; it was published in 1976 before the movie's release. He also published a sequel to Star Wars, Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012; according to Foster, Disney stopped paying him royalties. Last year, Disney bought 20th Century Fox, acquiring the rights to some other novelizations by Foster: Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3. Disney hasn't paid Foster a dime on any of the Alien books, he says.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Hot spring chicken: 3 cited for Yellowstone culinary caper:

A park ranger heard that a group with cooking pots were hiking toward the park's Shoshone Geyser Basin. The ranger found two whole chickens in a burlap sack in a hot spring. A cooking pot was nearby, Yellowstone spokeswoman Linda Veress said.

"Make dinner," said defendant Eric Roberts, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, when asked Thursday what the group was up to in the Yellowstone backcountry.

As for whose idea it was: "It was kind of a joint thing," Roberts explained.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

China plans to bring back the first Moon rocks for 40 years:

Chang'e 5, scheduled for launch around November 24th, is intended to drill two metres down into the Moon's surface, retrieve about 2kg of rock, and then return this to Earth. If successful, it will be the first lunar sample-return mission since 1976, when a Soviet probe called Luna 24 sent back a mere 170g of the stuff. And it will be another step forward in China's space programme.

The Chang'e missions, named after a Chinese Moon goddess, have had their ups and downs. Chang'e 5 was originally scheduled for blast off in 2017, but the failure in July of that year of an otherwise-unrelated project that was, like Chang'e 5, using a Long March 5 as its launch vehicle, caused a delay. (Chang'e 4 used a different sort of launcher, a Long March 3B.) The "go" does, however, now seem to have been given. State media reported on November 17th that the rocket with Chang'e 5 on board has been moved to its launch pad at Wenchang space centre, on Hainan island.

Assuming the launch goes to plan, success will then depend on a complex ballet involving the craft's four components. These are a service module, a return-to-Earth module, a lunar lander and an ascender—a configuration originally used by America's Apollo project. Once the mission is in lunar orbit, the lander and the ascender will separate from the orbiting mother ship of service and return modules as a single unit and go down to the surface. The landing site is in the northern part of a vast expanse of basalt called Oceanus Procellarum, a previously unvisited area. Researchers hope rocks collected here will confirm that volcanic activity on the Moon continued until far more recently than the 3.5bn years ago that is the estimate derived from studies of currently available samples.

Once the new material has been gathered, which will take several days, the ascender will lift off, dock with the mother ship and transfer its haul to the return module. The service module will then carry the return module back to Earth, releasing it just before arrival to make a landing at a recovery site in Inner Mongolia, also used for China's crewed missions, in December.

I wonder if this will this put another nail in the coffin of the exorbitantly-expensive SLS (Space Launch System) or be leveraged to increase its funding?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Apple drops its cut of App Store revenues from 30% to 15% for some developers:

In one of the biggest changes to the App Store model ever, Apple [...] announced that the majority of third-party developers releasing apps and games on the company's App Store will see a reduction in Apple's cut of revenues from 30 percent to 15 percent. The company calls it the App Store Small Business Program, and it aims to improve the company's standing in public perception and antitrust battles while minimally impacting its own bottom line.

The program is opt-in, and any developer whose combined revenue across all their apps was less than $1 million in the previous year (or any developers new to the App Store) can apply and be accepted. The revenue measure at play here includes not just app purchases, but also in-app purchase (IAP) and subscriptions revenue.

If during the course of the year the developer surpasses the $1 million threshold, the 30-percent rate will kick back into effect for the remainder of that year. If the developer falls below the threshold again, they'll receive the 15-percent rate once more the following year.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A biochemical random number:

True random numbers are required in fields as diverse as slot machines and data encryption. These numbers need to be truly random, such that they cannot even be predicted by people with detailed knowledge of the method used to generate them.

[...] For this new approach, the ETH researchers apply the synthesis of DNA molecules, an established chemical research method frequently employed over many years. It is traditionally used to produce a precisely defined DNA sequence. In this case, however, the research team built DNA molecules with 64 building block positions, in which one of the four DNA bases A, C, G and T was randomly located at each position. The scientists achieved this by using a mixture of the four building blocks, rather than just one, at every step of the synthesis.

As a result, a relatively simple synthesis produced a combination of approximately three quadrillion individual molecules. The scientists subsequently used an effective method to determine the DNA sequence of five million of these molecules. This resulted in 12 megabytes of data, which the researchers stored as zeros and ones on a computer.

[...] However, an analysis showed that the distribution of the four building blocks A, C, G and T was not completely even. Either the intricacies of nature or the synthesis method deployed led to the bases G and T being integrated more frequently in the molecules than A and C. Nonetheless, the scientists were able to correct this bias with a simple algorithm, thereby generating perfect random numbers.

Journal Reference:
Linda C. Meiser, Julian Koch, Philipp L. Antkowiak, et al. DNA synthesis for true random number generation [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19757-y)

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

See this page Dev Fonts.

Which one of these fonts, or alternately, what other font not appearing on that page is "the true one and only" programming font?

Let the (friendly!) battles begin!

(Please include, if possible, a link from which it can be downloaded.--Ed.)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The Caribbean islands poisoned by a carcinogenic pesticide:

"First we were enslaved. Then we were poisoned." That's how many on Martinique see the history of their French Caribbean island that, to tourists, means sun, rum, and palm-fringed beaches. Slavery was abolished in 1848. But today the islanders are victims again - of a toxic pesticide called chlordecone that's poisoned the soil and water and been linked to unusually high rates of prostate cancer.

"They never told us it was dangerous," Ambroise Bertin says. "So people were working, because they wanted the money. We didn't have any instructions about what was, and wasn't, good. That's why a lot of people are poisoned." He's talking about chlordecone, a chemical in the form of a white powder that plantation workers were told to put under banana trees, to protect them from insects.

Ambroise did that job for many years. Later, he got prostate cancer, a disease that is commoner on Martinique and its sister French island of Guadeloupe than anywhere else in the world. And scientists blame chlordecone, a persistent organic pollutant related to DDT. It was authorised for use in the French West Indies long after its harmful effects became widely known.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Hidden world of bacteria and fungi discovered on Leonardo da Vinci's drawings:

Leonardo da Vinci is famous for his elaborate, nuanced artworks and advanced technological ideas. But new research has revealed another level of complexity to his drawings: a hidden world of tiny life-forms on his artwork.

The findings, the researchers said, could help build a microbiome "catalogue" for artwork. Each of the pieces had a unique enough collection of microbes that researchers could have identified it again later purely from a study of its microscopic biology. And the drawings' microbiomes had enough key elements in common to help researchers spot counterfeits based on differences in their microbiomes, or even authentic drawings that had been stored in different conditions over the centuries. The researchers also showed that da Vinci's drawings had a significantly different microbiome than expected, with lots of bacteria and human DNA — likely a consequence of centuries of handling by art restorers and other people. Microbes known to make paper degrade over time were also present, showing why those restorers' efforts had been necessary The study amounts to a proof-of-concept exercise, showing how microbiomes might, in the future, reveal unexpected histories of certain artworks or help detect forgeries.

Researchers examined the microscopic biological material, living and dead, in seven of the master's "emblematic" drawings, and found an unexpected diversity of bacteria, fungi and human DNA. Most of that material probably landed on the sketches well after da Vinci's death 501 years ago, so the DNA (or the bulk of it at least) likely comes from other people who have handled the drawings over the centuries and not the polymath himself. But the newfound biological materials do have a story to tell.

[...] The biggest surprise, the researchers wrote, was the high concentration of bacteria in the drawings, especially as compared with fungi. Past studies have shown that fungi tend to dominate the microbiomes of paper objects such as these drawings, but in this case an unusually high amount of bacteria from humans and insects (likely flies that pooped on the paper at some point) were present.

The study was published Friday (Nov. 20) in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

Journal Reference:
Piñar, Guadalupe, Guadalupe, Sclocchi, Maria Carla, Pinzari, Flavia, et al. The Microbiome of Leonardo da Vinci's Drawings: A Bio-Archive of Their History, Frontiers in Microbiology (DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2020.593401)

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

From the horse's mouth

Corning Incorporated (NYSE: GLW) announced on Thursday a new breakthrough in glass-ceramic technology, Corning® Guardiant®. Under test methods approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), paint and coatings containing Corning Guardiant were shown to kill more than 99.9% of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The tests provide the first demonstration of highly durable antimicrobial activity against SARS-CoV-2. The demonstrated antimicrobial efficacy remained active even after tests simulating six years of scrubbing. The tests were designed to account for the cleaning that a surface could be subjected to over time.

[...] Corning is working alongside PPG as it seeks EPA registration for its paint product formulated with Corning Guardiant.

Corning Guardiant contains copper, which has been shown to exhibit antimicrobial efficacy when applied to surfaces, consistently reducing germs on contact. Corning Guardiant keeps the most effective form of copper readily available for reducing harmful germs.

[...] Corning is currently collaborating with leading paint and coatings manufacturers around the world, including PPG, to develop products containing Corning Guardiant that meet governmental and regulatory requirements. Subject to EPA approval, PPG's antiviral paint product will be available under the name COPPER ARMOR™

[...] The results of SARS-CoV-2 testing on coatings containing Corning Guardiant were recently obtained by Dr. Luisa Ikner in Professor Charles Gerba's lab at the University of Arizona. Following U.S. EPA recommendations that test methods mimic in-use conditions for antimicrobial surface materials seeking claims against harmful germs, the lab used stringent test methods that simulated realistic contamination, which is dry and invisible.

In addition to the SARS-CoV-2 results, Corning has also published research on Corning Guardiant demonstrating kill[sic] of other bacteria and viruses with greater than 99.9% efficacy in under two hours, including gram positive bacteria (such as Staphylococcus aureus), gram negative bacteria (such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa), and non-enveloped viruses (such as murine norovirus, which belongs to the hardest-to-kill class of viruses in terms of its susceptibility to disinfectants).

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Hackers can use just-fixed Intel bugs to install malicious firmware on PCs:

As the amount of sensitive data stored on computers has exploded over the past decade, hardware and software makers have invested increasing amounts of resources into securing devices against physical attacks in the event that they're lost, stolen, or confiscated. Earlier this week, Intel fixed a series of bugs that made it possible for attackers to install malicious firmware on millions of computers that use its CPUs.

The vulnerabilities allowed hackers with physical access to override a protection Intel built into modern CPUs that prevents unauthorized firmware from running during the boot process. Known as Boot Guard, the measure is designed to anchor a chain of trust directly into the silicon to ensure that all firmware that loads is digitally signed by the computer manufacturer. Boot Guard protects against the possibility of someone tampering with the SPI-connected flash chip that stores the UEFI, which is a complex piece of firmware that bridges a PC's device firmware with its operating system.

[...] Intel isn't saying how it fixed a vulnerability that stems from fuse settings that can't be reset. Hudson suspects that Intel made the change using firmware that runs in the Intel Management Engine, a security and management coprocessor inside the CPU chipset that handles access to the OTP fuses, among many other things. (Earlier this week, Intel published never-before-disclosed details about the ME here.)

The two other vulnerabilities stemmed from flaws in the way CPUs fetched firmware when they were powered up. All three of the vulnerabilities were indexed under the single tracking ID CVE-2020-8705, which received a high severity rating from Intel. (Intel has an overview of all November security patches here. Computer manufacturers began making updates available this week. Hudson's post, linked above, has a far more detailed and technical writeup.

Original Submission