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c0lo writes:

Stop the spread: no more plosive consonants (watch it)

Picked from abc.net.au

In the joke clip, Mr Prowse suggests the sounds produced by the letters P, T and C will be phased out and replaced with the sounds produced by N, F and L.

"Consonants project the virus for much greater distances than vowels, and certain consonants — the so-called plosive sounds — are worst of all," he says in the video, which was posted online earlier this month.

[...] Speaking conventionally to ABC Radio Adelaide this morning, Mr Prowse said the public response to the video was completely unexpected.

[...] "It happened all around the world, largely due to a rapper called Zuby, who re-posted it to [a] third-of-a-million followers."

Despite the video being marked as a joke on his YouTube page, some viewers were fooled into taking it seriously.

"Quite a lot of them [are] in America and a lot of them didn't actually realise it was a joke," he said.

Other similar jokes in French and German and some more details here.

No news on the classical Greek; aristarchus could not be contacted

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Video game revenues in 2020 set to top sports, movie industries:

Global video game revenue is up 20 percent in 2020, and will finish the year at an eye-watering $180 billion according to data from IDC. That figure beats the pre-coronavirus $100 billion that movies brought in in 2019, and the $75 billion brought in by the major sports leagues around the world.

And unlike sports and movies, which were both hit hard this year by the shuttering of stadiums and theaters, video games have only seen their popularity increase as people have looked for new ways to pass the time.

[...] Indeed, in an interview with MarketWatch, IDC’s Lewis Ward said that he doesn’t see a slowdown in video game sales coming any time soon.

Specifically mentioned game systems with higher demand are the Nintendo Switch, the Xbox Series X, and the Playstation 5.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

After spending years working behind the scenes to persuade regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington DC, 30 states, and at least a dozen other countries, Oracle's efforts to rein in Google's search-and-advertising business are paying off:

With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October.

[...] Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle’s “black box” presentation showing how Google tracks users’ personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle’s top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the software company’s antitrust campaign against Google.

Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users’ location details — even when the phones aren’t in use — and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign.

[...] The onslaught of antitrust challenges is hardly just Oracle’s doing. Government officials, academics, lawmakers and public-interest groups have agreed for some time that U.S. technology giants have gotten so big that they are squeezing out competition and dragging down economic growth. Oracle acted on those concerns early, even if largely out of self-interest.

Original story reported by Bloomberg and appeared on MSN.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

DeepMind's New AI Masters Games Without Even Being Taught the Rules: (Javascript required)

The folks at DeepMind are pushing their methods one step further toward the dream of a machine that learns on its own, the way a child does.

The London-based company, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is officially publishing the research today, in Nature, although it tipped its hand back in November with a preprint in ArXiv. Only now, though, are the implications becoming clear: DeepMind is already looking into real-world applications.

DeepMind won fame in 2016 for AlphaGo, a reinforcement-learning system that beat the game of Go after training on millions of master-level games. In 2018 the company followed up with AlphaZero, which trained itself to beat Go, Chess and Shogi, all without recourse to master games or advice. Now comes MuZero, which doesn't even need to be shown the rules of the game.

The new system tries first one action, then another, learning what the rules allow, at the same time noticing the rewards that are proffered—in chess, by delivering checkmate; in Pac-Man, by swallowing a yellow dot. It then alters its methods until it hits on a way to win such rewards more readily—that is, it improves its play. Such learning by observation is ideal for any AI that faces problems that can't be specified easily. In the messy real world—apart from the abstract purity of games—such problems abound.

So, how far do you think this approach can advance ?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Sex at Christmas tends to be off menu until fireworks at new year – study:

Researchers have long noticed differences in birthrates at various times of the year, but whether this was the result of seasonal fluctuations in fertility or sexual activity was unclear. To investigate, Laura Symul at Stanford University in California and her colleagues turned to data from the Clue women's health app, which included anonymous sexual activity logs from more than 500,000 women in the UK, France, Brazil, and the US. "It's self-reported, but it is still the largest dataset of real-time reports of women's sexual activities," Symul said.

The research showed that holidays – including bank holidays and Valentine's Day – were always associated with a peak in sexual activity. "There was also a very strong difference between weekend and weekdays – people have more sex on weekends," said Micaela Martinez at Columbia University in New York, who was also involved in the research. "It suggests that having leisure time with your intimate partner facilitates sex."

However, the records indicated that the three days running up to Christmas represented a no-go zone for many women. In the case of younger or child-free women, this could be due to them spending Christmas with their parents, rather than romantic partners, Symul said.

MostCynical writes:

Boating Magazine has a story about the new Volvo Penta self-docking boat.

While autopilot has been available in boats for ages, Volvo's new docking system moves beyond that. It's a big step toward true self-driving boats. While cars can be expected to primarily move forward down a road, autonomy in boats is more complex because they have to be able to move in multiple directions. What's more, for a boat, the road is moving. The yacht uses the joystick-controlled Volvo Penta Inboard Performance System (IPS), which was first sold in 2006. The company later introduced the Dynamic Positioning System, which uses individual drives to automatically preserve a boat's heading and position, even during strong winds or tides. The self-docking yacht incorporates both of these systems into an onboard electronic vessel control system, which maneuvers the steering according to the boat's actual position.

When the boat arrives in a predefined "catch zone," it alerts the captain that it's ready to activate the self-docking function. Once initiated, the boat relies on GPS to move close to the berth, and waits for the captain to enable the final stage[.]

The system uses GPS and local sensors on both the boat and the berth to identify the docking location. After making the system available for retrofit on IPS-enabled vessels, Volvo intends to develop a fully-automated boat.

Original Submission

hendrikboom writes:

Veracode has compared programming languages for incidence of vulnerabilities by collecting statistics on 130,000 applications they have scanned.

Programming language security: These are the worst bugs for each top language

C++ and PHP have far more high-severity security flaws than programming languages like JavaScript and Python.

Let the language wars resume.

-- hendrik

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

YouTube's Copyright Filter Is Crushing Video Critique:

In July, Harry "hbomberguy" Brewis shared a video on his popular YouTube channel called "RWBY Is Disappointing, And Here's Why." The two-and-half-hour video — a sharp, detailed critique of the cartoon RWBY — was the result of a lot of work by Brewis and his producer, Kat Lo. It also took an extra week and a half of editing and $1,000 in legal fees just to get and keep the video up on YouTube. All because of YouTube's copyright filter. And thanks to a new proposed law by Sen. Thom Tillis, Brewis' experience could become virtually everyone's.

YouTube's copyright filter is a labyrinthine nightmare called Content ID. Content ID works by scanning all the videos on YouTube and comparing them to a database of material submitted by copyright holders—often music labels and movie and TV studios—which have been given the ability to add things to the database by YouTube. Once Content ID matches a few seconds of an uploaded video to something in the database — regardless of context — a number of automatic penalties can be imposed. According to Google, most of the time the rights-holder chooses to just take the money generated by ads placed by Google on the video. If the original creator didn't want any ads put on their video, too bad. But in other cases, the rights-holder can make something much worse happen: They can make sure no one sees the video at all.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Let's Encrypt comes up with workaround for abandonware Android devices:

Things were touch-and-go for a while, but it looks like Let's Encrypt's transition to a standalone certificate authority (CA) isn't going to break a ton of old Android phones. This was a serious concern earlier due to an expiring root certificate, but Let's Encrypt has come up with a workaround.

[...] Yesterday, Let's Encrypt announced it had found a solution that will let those old Android phones keep ticking, and the solution is to just... keep using the expired certificate from IdenTrust? Let's Encrypt says "IdenTrust has agreed to issue a 3-year cross-sign for our ISRG Root X1 from their DST Root CA X3. The new cross-sign will be somewhat novel because it extends beyond the expiration of DST Root CA X3. This solution works because Android intentionally does not enforce the expiration dates of certificates used as trust anchors. ISRG and IdenTrust reached out to our auditors and root programs to review this plan and ensure there weren't any compliance concerns."

c0lo writes:

Long Covid alarm as 21% report symptoms after five weeks

A fifth of people still have coronavirus symptoms five weeks after being infected, with half of them continuing to experience problems for at least 12 weeks, official data suggests, as concerns grow about the scale and impact of "long Covid".

Previous estimates suggested 14.5% of people in the UK had symptoms for at least four weeks, with 2.2% likely to have symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more. But new figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest ongoing symptoms could be more common than previously thought.

The latest data for England, based on the Covid infection survey, which randomly samples households for coronavirus, reveals 21% of almost 8,200 participants who were followed up after testing positive still had symptoms five weeks after infection, with 9.9% reporting symptoms 12 weeks after infection.

Long COVID guidelines need to reflect lived experience - DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32705-7

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Over-Engineered Bottle Opener Takes The Drudgery Out Of Drinking:

Some projects take but a single glance for you to know what inspired them in the first place. For this over-engineered robotic bottle opener, the obvious influence was a combination of abundant free time and beer. Plenty of beer.

Of course there are many ways to pop the top on a tall cold one, depending on the occasion. [Matt McCoy] and his cohorts selected the "high-impulse" method, which when not performed by a robot is often accomplished by resting the edge of the cap on a countertop and slapping the bottle down with the palm of one's hand. This magnificently pointless machine does the same thing, except with style.

What's your most memorable beverage-opening story?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Firefox continues cracking down on tracking with cache partitioning:

Firefox version 85 will be released in January 2021, and one of its features is increased user privacy via improvements in client-side storage (cache) partitioning. This has been widely and incorrectly reported elsewhere as network partitioning, likely due to confusion around the privacy.partition.network_state flag in Firefox, which allows advanced users to enable or disable cache partitioning as desired.

What is cache partitioning—and why might I want it?

In a nutshell, cache partitioning is the process of keeping separate cache pools for separate websites, based on the site requesting the resources loaded, rather than simply on the site providing the resources.

[...] For a more detailed discussion of client-side storage partitioning, see the W3C Privacy Community Group's work item on the topic, at https://github.com/privacycg/storage-partitioning.

What's the downside to cache partitioning?

There are some Web resources which are legitimately used near-universally across thousands or millions of sites—for example, embedded fonts being delivered from fonts.google.com. With a globally scoped cache, site1.com might embed a copy of the Roboto font from fonts.google.com, and when site2.com through site999.com embed the same font, it can be delivered from the browser cache.

Although this will be the broadest userdata cache partitioning scheme in production once launched, Mozilla is playing catch-up in deploying one at all. Apple began partitioning Safari's browser cache in 2013 and has continued to partition it further since, and Google partitioned Chrome's HTTP cache beginning with Chrome 86, released in early October.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

NASA says it will fly a Canadian to the Moon:

NASA just struck a historic deal with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) that will entail, for the first time in history, a non-US astronaut orbiting the Moon.

The agreement says that the CSA will help NASA with its upcoming Artemis Moon missions in exchange for a seat on some of the flights, according to Space.com. Not only is the CSA's support good news for the Artemis missions specifically, but it's a major international development in the future of crewed space exploration.

[...] "This will make Canada only the second country after the U.S. to have an astronaut in deep space... and send the first Canadian around the Moon," Navdeep Bains, Canada's government minister of innovation, science and industry said at a Wednesday press conference, according to Space.com.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Linux 5.11 Drops AMD Zen Voltage/Current Reporting Over Lack Of Documentation - Phoronix:

Earlier in 2020 this long-standing AMD hwmon temperature driver added support for core/SoC current and voltage reporting with Zen processors based on the work by the community and some best assumptions around the appropriate registers. But now that support is being dropped for lack of accuracy in some configurations and the possibility it might even damage the hardware.

Last week was the main hwmon pull request for the Linux 5.11 cycle while sent in today was a secondary update with the sole change being the removal of this k10temp current/voltage reporting.

The support is being removed as it "turns out that [it] was not worth the trouble."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Scientists say there was a huge, mysterious object in the early solar system:

After studying one of the fragments of an asteroid that exploded over Sudan, a team of scientists arrived at a provocative conclusion.

The researchers suggest that at least one giant space rock, the size of a dwarf planet, orbited the Sun during the earliest days of our solar system. Inside of the tiny asteroid splinter allocated to the study, they found an unusual crystal structure that couldn't have formed inside a typical asteroid, according to the research the team published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[...] The rare hydrated crystals, called amphiboles, are formed after extremely-lengthy exposures to heat and pressure — more so than could be provided by a typical meteorite. That suggests, according to the study, that the rock broke off of something on the scale of the dwarf planet Ceres.

[...] "Our surprising result suggests the existence of a large, water-rich parent body," she added in a separate statement.

[...] The international team of scientists assumes that whatever giant object formed the crystals is long gone, perhaps explaining why fragments of it have now crashed into Earth.

Journal Reference:
V. E. Hamilton, C. A. Goodrich, A. H. Treiman, et al. Meteoritic evidence for a Ceres-sized water-rich carbonaceous chondrite parent asteroid, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01274-z)

Original Submission