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takyon writes:

Christopher Nolan Rips HBO Max as "Worst Streaming Service," Denounces Warner Bros.' Plan

To many insiders, WarnerMedia's blindsiding of talent and their reps with news that it would send 17 films directly to HBO Max in 2021 felt like an insult.

For many in the movie business — producers, directors, stars and their representatives — Dec. 3, 2020, is a day that will live in infamy.

"Some of our industry's biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service," filmmaker Christopher Nolan, whose relationship with Warners dates back to Insomnia in 2002, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

[...] According to a source, [Warner Bros. film studio chairman Toby] Emmerich tried to soothe In the Heights director Jon M. Chu by pointing out that the movie was still getting a "global theatrical release." But industry insiders say the studio is pretending that pirates won't pounce as soon as these films are streaming on HBO Max. As soon as one does, there's an "excellent version of the movie everywhere immediately," notes one industry veteran.

[...] Many think Legendary [Entertainment] will be the first to file a legal challenge. The company fired off a previous lawyer letter after Netflix offered something north of $225 million for the rights to Godzilla vs. Kong, which has seen its release date moved from March 2020 to November to May 2021. Though Legendary financed 75 percent of the movie, Warners had the power to block the sale and did. Legendary asked whether the studio would then give it a deal to stream the movie on HBO Max — and got no clear answer until its executives woke up one December morning to find that the movie was going day-and-date on the service without the benefit of a negotiation. Legendary's even more expensive picture, Dune, is getting the same treatment. The other companies that finance Warners movies, Village Roadshow and Bron, are also said to be aggrieved parties that might end up going to court.

Related: AT&T Exempts HBO Max From Data Caps but Still Limits Your Netflix Use
"Gone With the Wind" -- Gone from HBO Max

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Famed pilot Chuck Yeager dies at age 97:

Gen. Chuck Yeager, an Air Force test pilot who became the first human to break the sound barrier, died Monday at the age of 97. His death was announced in a message on his official Twitter account attributed to Yeager's wife, actress Victoria Scott D'Angelo.

"It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET," she tweeted. "An incredible life well lived, America's greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever."

[...] Yeager's exploits were chronicled in Tom Wolfe's 1979 book and the 1983 film The Right Stuff, which followed the early days of the US space program. Yeager is portrayed in the film by actor Sam Shepard but makes a cameo appearance as Fred, a bartender at the legendary Poncho's Happy Bottom Riding Club.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Why Covid may mean more facial recognition tech:

Like many people who began to wear a face mask during the pandemic, Hassan Ugail quickly noticed one or two technical niggles.

His iPhone started having trouble recognising his face, which is how he preferred to unlock the device when out and about.

"I kind of have to take my mask off," says Prof Ugail, an expert in facial recognition at the University of Bradford. "I would rather it let me in by just looking at my eyes."

Coincidentally, research he conducted with one of his PhD students that was published last year had shown that half a face was enough for a specially trained facial recognition algorithm to work.

But out in the wild, some commercial systems that authenticate people via their faces were now stuttering thanks to the rise of masks.

The problem was highlighted in a July report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US. Researchers found the error rates of 89 different facial recognition systems they tested increased when the mouth and nose or bottom half of an individual's face was obscured - in some cases from less than 1% to as much as 50%.

[...] An updated report from NIST has now found that several algorithms, reconfigured since the pandemic began, make far fewer mistakes when analysing masked faces. In some cases, error rates were ten times better than before.

"Developers are indeed adapting their algorithms to handle face masks." says Mei Ngan, a computer scientist at NIST.

[...] The progress means facial recognition could now become even more widespread than before with companies marketing it as a contactless, potentially more hygienic, means of verifying identities in public places.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Wormable, Zero-Click Vulnerability in Microsoft Teams:

Security researcher Oskars Vegeris has published documentation on a wormable, cross-platform vulnerability in Microsoft Teams that could allow invisible malicious hacker attacks.

Vegeris, a security engineer at Evolution Gaming, warned that a novel cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability at the ‘teams.microsoft.com’ domain could be abused to trigger a remote code execution flaw in the Microsoft Teams desktop application.

[...] According to an advisory published by Vegeris, an attacker simply needs to send a specially crafted message to any Teams user or channel to launch a successful exploit that runs silently in the background, without the user noticing anything.

“Remote Code Execution has been achieved in desktop applications across all supported platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux). Code execution gives attackers full access to victim devices and company internal networks via those devices,” Vegeris warned.

He said an attacker could abuse the XSS flaw to obtain SSO authorization tokens for Teams or other Microsoft services, or to access confidential conversations and files from the communications service.

On top of that, the vulnerability is wormable, allowing a successful attacker to automatically send the exploit payload to other users/channels, also without interaction.

[...] The security researcher, who provides technical details on the flaw and a demonstration on how it can be exploited, claims Microsoft has downplayed the severity of the vulnerability, assigning an "important" rating with a "spoofing" risk.

He said Microsoft took the Teams desktop clients “out of scope” and told the researcher it wouldn’t issue a CVE number for the flaw, because vulnerabilities in Microsoft Teams are fixed via automatic updates.

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looorg writes:

WOZX. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is starting — okay he apparently started it over a year ago but it sort of didn't do anything — a new green company. The company has created its own cryptocurrency tokens to fund green tech.

Steve Wozniak is starting another company, 45 years after co-founding Apple with Steve Jobs:

Efforce, which has been in stealth mode for almost a year, is a marketplace for corporate or industrial building owners to have "green" projects funded.

According to Efforce, "investors can participate in energy efficiency projects buy acquiring tokenized future savings," while companies benefit from such improvements "at no cost." Using blockchain, "a smart contract redistributes the resulting savings to token holders and the companies without intermediaries based on exact consumption/savings data."

According to Wozniak, "energy consumption and CO2 emissions worldwide have grown exponentially, leading to climate change and extreme consequences to our environment. We can improve our energy footprint and lower our energy consumption without changing our habits. We can save the environment simply by making more energy improvements," he said a statement about the company.

So how are those eco-friendly, green cryptotokens generated?

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radical dreamer writes:

In its weekly feature, This Week in History, the World Socialist Web Site, published by the ICFI and Socialist Equality Parties, reviewed the historic Galileo mission to Jupiter. This week in history: December 7-13,

On December 7, 1995, the spacecraft Galileo reached Jupiter in a stable orbit around the giant planet, demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of science and technology....

At a total 20-year cost of $1.3 billion--less than the Pentagon squandered on a single Trident nuclear submarine in 1995--the landmark mission revolutionized man's understanding of the giant gaseous planets... which [comprise] the bulk of the solar system outside the sun itself....

The initial conception of the Galileo mission was developed by NASA during the Ford administration, and many of the scientists and engineers devoted 20 years, virtually their entire careers, to the effort. More than 10,000 scientists were employed on Galileo and at critical moments were mobilized round-the-clock to solve problems which threatened the project. The 1986 Challenger disaster pushed back the launching of the spacecraft and forced a complete redesign of its flight path, since it was considered dangerous to carry out the original notion of lifting a Centaur rocket booster into orbit around the Earth that would have blasted Galileo directly towards Jupiter. A new path was designed, making use of the gravitational pull of other planets to sling the craft into its correct trajectory.

Galileo was launched in 1989. It spent a total of eight years in the Jovian system, mapping the complex of satellites, which includes the four "Galilean" moons, visible to the great Italian astronomer through his early telescope, and dozens of smaller ones. The mission was terminated on September 20, 2003, by sending Galileo into Jupiter's atmosphere at a very high speed to incinerate it and prevent potential contamination of other moons in the solar system by bacteria from Earth.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Quantum device performs 2.6 billion years of computation in 4 minutes:

I am a great believer in solving problems with lasers. Are you suffering from a severely polarized society and a fast-growing population living below the poverty line? Well, I have the laser to solve all your problems.

OK, maybe not. But when it comes to quantum computing, I am of the belief that lasers are the future. I suspect that the current architectures are akin to the Colossus or the ENIAC: they are breakthroughs in their own right, but they are not the future. My admittedly biased opinion is that the future is optical. A new paper provides my opinion some support, demonstrating solutions to a mind-boggling 10³⁰ problem space using a quantum optical system. Unfortunately, the support is a little more limited than I'd like, as it is a rather limited breakthrough.

[...] Unlike both of these options, an optical quantum computer could be a (large) chip-scale device that is powered by an array of laser diodes, with read out done by a series of single-photon detectors. None of these requires ultralow temperatures or vacuum (if photon-counting detectors are required, then liquid nitrogen would be required). Optical quantum computing will require temperature stability and, as this paper demonstrates, a rather complicated feedback system to ensure that the lasers are working exactly as required. However, all of that could be contained in one large rack-mounted box. And that is, for me, the critical advantage of optical systems.

This does not mean that light will win though. After all, germanium is a better semiconductor than silicon, but silicon still rules the roost.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Rise of the underdog: A neglected mechanism in antiferromagnets may be key to spintronics:

Enormous efforts are being made worldwide in a technological field that could far surpass the capabilities of conventional electronics: spintronics. Instead of operating based on the collective movement of charged particles (electrons), spintronic devices could perform memory storage and data transmission by manipulating spin, an intrinsic property of elementary particles related to angular momentum and from which many magnetic characteristics in materials arise. Unfortunately, controlling spin has proven to be a challenging endeavor, leading physicists and engineers to look for efficient materials and techniques to do so.

In this regard, antiferromagnetic materials (AFMs) are good candidates for spintronics because they are resistant to external magnetic fields and allow for switching spin values in timescales of picoseconds. One promising strategy to manipulate spin orientation in AFMs is using an optical laser to create extremely short-lived magnetic field pulses, a phenomenon known as the inverse Faraday effect (IFE). Although the IFE in AFMs generates two very distinct types of torque (rotational force) on their magnetization, it now seems the most important of the two has somehow been neglected in research.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, a trio of scientists, including Professor Takuya Satoh from the Tokyo Tech, Japan, delved deep into this issue. Spin dynamics in AFMs are described by a sum of two terms: field-like torque and damping-like torque. The latter, as the word 'damping' implies, is related to the gradual decay (or dying off) of the spin oscillations triggered by the optical pulses on the material.

[...] Although much more research will certainly be needed before applied spintronics becomes a reality, uncovering efficient mechanisms for spin manipulation is obviously among the first steps. This study proves that such mechanisms might be hidden in phenomena we know and neglect!

Journal Reference:
Christian Tzschaschel, Takuya Satoh, Manfred Fiebig. Efficient spin excitation via ultrafast damping-like torques in antiferromagnets [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19749-y)

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/nsa-says-russian-state-hackers-are-using-a-vmware-flaw-to-ransack-networks/

The National Security Agency says that Russian state hackers are compromising multiple VMware systems in attacks that allow the hackers to install malware, gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, and maintain a persistent hold on widely used remote work platforms.

The in-progress attacks are exploiting a security bug that remained unpatched until last Thursday, the agency reported on Monday. CVE-2020-4006, as the flaw is tracked, is a command-injection flaw, meaning it allows attackers to execute commands of their choice on the operating system running the vulnerable software. These vulnerabilities are the result of code that fails to filter unsafe user input such as HTTP headers or cookies. VMware patched CVE-2020-4006 after being tipped off by the NSA.

Previously:
Critical VMware Zero-Day Bug Allows Command Injection; Patch Pending

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/fbi-used-patriot-act-to-gather-website-visitor-logs-in-2019-report-finds/

The federal government gathered up visitor logs for some websites in 2019, the Office of Director of National Intelligence disclosed in letters made public this week. And the feds cited authority derived from a provision of the Patriot Act to do it.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe confirmed these actions in a November 6 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), part of an exchange (PDF) first obtained and published by the New York Times.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/spacex-gets-886-million-from-fcc-to-subsidize-starlink-i

SpaceX has been awarded $885.51 million by the Federal Communications Commission to provide Starlink broadband to 642,925 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. The satellite provider was one of the biggest winners in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, the results of which were released today. Funding is distributed over 10 years, so SpaceX's haul will amount to a little over $88.5 million per year.

Charter Communications, the second-largest US cable company after Comcast, did even better. Charter is set to receive $1.22 billion over 10 years to bring service to 1.06 million homes and businesses in 24 states.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Scientists Say They've Identified The Best Place For Life to Have Existed on Mars:

The surface of Mars, by every measurement we've taken, is currently an inhospitable wasteland. Only dust devils roam its arid surface; the only water is permanent ice. Yet evidence that water once flowed and pooled on the planet's surface keeps mounting.

[...] New research has found an answer: geothermal heat could have risen from deep inside the planet - in which case, the best place for life to thrive would have been deep underground.

"Even if greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor are pumped into the early Martian atmosphere in computer simulations, climate models still struggle to support a long-term warm and wet Mars," said planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

"I and my co-authors propose that the faint young Sun paradox may be reconciled, at least partly, if Mars had high geothermal heat in its past."

The faint young Sun paradox is the contradiction between the presence of liquid water in the early Solar System, and the faintness of the Sun. According to our understanding of stellar evolution, in the billion or so years after its formation 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun's heat and light would only have been about 70 percent of its current output.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Hidden structure found in essential metabolic machinery:

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that's essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

What Wright saw in 2015 — subcompartments inside organelles called peroxisomes — is described in a study published today in Nature Communications.

"This is, without a doubt, the most unexpected thing our lab has ever discovered," said study co-author Bonnie Bartel, Wright's Ph.D. adviser and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "This requires us to rethink everything we thought we knew about peroxisomes."

Peroxisomes are compartments where cells turn fatty molecules into energy and useful materials, like the myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells. In humans, peroxisome dysfunction has been linked to severe metabolic disorders, and peroxisomes may have wider significance for neurodegeneration, obesity, cancer and age-related disorders.

[...] The peroxisomes he was viewing were up to 100 times larger. Scientists aren't certain why peroxisomes get so large in Arabidopsis seedlings, but they do know that germinating Arabidopsis seeds get all of their energy from stored fat, until the seedling leaves can start producing energy from photosynthesis. During germination, they are sustained by countless tiny droplets of oil, and their peroxisomes must work overtime to process the oil. When they do, they grow several times larger than normal.

"Bright fluorescent proteins, in combination with much bigger peroxisomes in Arabidopsis, made it extremely apparent, and much easier, to see this," Wright said.

But peroxisomes are also highly conserved, from plants to yeast to humans, and Bartel said there are hints that these structures may be general features of peroxisomes.

"Peroxisomes are a basic organelle that has been with eukaryotes for a very long time, and there have been observations across eukaryotes, often in particular mutants, where the peroxisomes are either bigger or less packed with proteins, and thus easier to visualize," she said. But people didn't necessarily pay attention to those observations because the enlarged peroxisomes resulted from known mutations.

Journal Reference:
Zachary J. Wright, Bonnie Bartel. Peroxisomes form intralumenal vesicles with roles in fatty acid catabolism and protein compartmentalization in Arabidopsis [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20099-y)

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canopic jug writes:

[Ed note: this is a quite old story, but might lead to interesting discussion. What kind of simulators have you operated and how well did the prepare you for the real-life activity? Which ones were successful? Which ones were not?]

Back in 2013, TopGear brought in simulation champion Greger Huttu from Vaasa, Finland to drive a real racing car to investigate how well simulator skills transfer to physical racing. In a nutshell the answer is quite well, aside from the motion sickness.

After one installation lap to check everything's working, he starts his first flyer. All eyes turn to the final corner, a swooping downhill-right with a vicious wall on the outside, ready to collect understeery mishaps. Here comes Greger. The engine revs high and hard and his downshifts sound perfectly matched. Then he comes into sight and, to the sound of many sucked teeth, absolutely bloody nails it through the bend, throttle balanced, car planted. His only hiccup is a late upshift, that has the rotary engine blatting off its limiter. "Time to crank up the revs," says Alan. "He's quick."

The telemetry confirms it. His braking points are spot on. He's firm and precise on the throttle. And in the fastest corner, he's entering at 100mph compared to an experienced driver's 110 - a sign of absolute confidence and natural feel for grip. Remember, this is a guy who has never sat in a racing car in his life - he's only referencing thousands of virtual laps. Then, on lap four, he pops in a 1:24.8, just three seconds off a solid time around here. He reckons the car feels more grippy than it does online, but that's probably down to set-up and baking-hot tarmac. It's a weirdly familiar experience, he says, like déjà vu... with added sweat.

The air temperature is 34 degrees; in the cockpit, it's probably closer to 45. It's just too extreme for the increasingly sickly looking bloke from the Arctic. Then there's the g-forces. Road Atlanta is a bucking, weaving, undulating place, where your tummy floats over crests, then smashes into your intestines through compressions. This is another first for Greger. He's never been on a rollercoaster, or even in a fast road car. In fact, the quickest he's ever been was on the flight over here, which also happened to be his first plane ride. Which would explain why, as he hurtles down the back straight at 100mph, he throws up, right inside his helmet. When he rolls into the pits, little flecks of sick roll down his visor and his overalls are soggy around the neck.

For the most part, he handled the car quite well.

Previously:
(2020) Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine
(2020) Pacman Turns 40 Years Old
(2016) Aircraft Are Now So Automated Pilots Have Forgotten How to Fly
(2014) Video-Game Vehicle Crashes Get Real

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takyon writes:

Vendors Finally Pair Ryzen CPUs and High-End GPUs In Laptops

AMD's Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) processors may be mobile powerhouses, but for reasons unknown, laptop vendors were reluctant to pair the Zen 2 chips with high-end graphics cards. Ryzen 5000 (Cezanne), on the other hand, appears to have won over manufacturers as there are already retailer postings of upcoming laptops (via Tum_Apisak) with options that span up to a GeForce RTX 3080.

[...] The Ryzen 9 5900HX broke its cover recently, but the Zen 3 chip's secret remains to be unraveled. It's plausible that the Ryzen 9 5900HX is just a faster variant of its H-series counterpart or that AMD may have finally unlocked the multiplier for enthusiasts to overclock the processor, like what Intel allows with its HK-series SKUs.

[...] No one has any idea of when AMD will release Ryzen 5000, but the sudden appearance of benchmark submissions and retailer listings point to an imminent launch. CES 2020 is coming up, and AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech. It would be the ideal venue to announce the mobile Zen 3 chips since the desktop counterparts are already out.

"Cezanne" is the Zen 3 version of AMD's Zen 2 "Renoir" 4000-series APUs. "Lucienne" will consist of Zen 2 APUs (a Renoir refresh) confusingly given the same 5000-series naming as Cezanne.

One of the common theories behind a lack of high-end GPU options has been that AMD's Renoir limits a discrete mobile GPU to a PCIe 3.0 x8 connection (instead of x16), which can be a slight bottleneck for higher end mobile GPUs. Others believe it's just due to OEMs cheaping out on AMD systems.

Upcoming mobile GPUs (like the mobile RTX 3080 mentioned) could bring up to 16 GB of VRAM to laptops.

See also: AMD Radeon RX 6000M RDNA 2 Mobility GPUs Based on Navi 22, Navi 23, Navi 24 SKUs Further Detailed – Die Sizes, TGPs, Clock Limits

Related: AMD Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' APU Runs Crysis Without Any Cooling Solution
AMD Succeeds in its 25x20 Goal: 2020 "Renoir" Over 31 Times More Efficient than 2014 "Kaveri" Chips
AMD Launches Ryzen 4000G Desktop APUs: OEM-Only at First

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