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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/anal-swab-china-coronavirus/2021/01/27/cc284f56-6054-11eb-a177-7765f29a9524_story.html

Months-long lockdowns. Entire city populations herded through the streets for mandatory testing. The people of China could be forgiven for thinking they had seen it all during the coronavirus pandemic.

But now they face a new indignity: the addition of anal swabs — yes, you read that right — to the testing regimen for those in quarantine.

Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.

Yet for many, it seemed a step too far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding pandemic.

"Everyone involved will be so embarrassed," one user in Guang­dong province said Wednesday on ­Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll, 80 percent of respondents said they "could not accept" the invasive method.

[...] The new protocol comes just over a year after the virus began spreading rapidly in the country. Chinese officials are worried about the approach of Lunar New Year next month, often called the world's largest annual migration. Some 3 billion trips are made over the holiday during a non-pandemic year, which means even a single silent coronavirus case could rapidly leapfrog across the nation.

Journal Reference:
Mei Sun, Dong Guo, Jing Zhang, et al. Anal swab as a potentially optimal specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection to evaluate hospital discharge of COVID-19 patients [open], Future Microbiology (DOI: 10.2217/fmb-2020-0090)

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MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for c0lo.

Aerion Supersonic As2: New Supersonic Jet Undergoes Testing As Giant Manufacturing Plant Unveiled:

Aerion Supersonic, one of several companies developing a next-generation supersonic jet, is moving forward with its plans to start production on its aircraft in 2023.

[...] The $300 million facility will be located near Melbourne-Orlando Airport with about 185,000 square metres of building space, plus taxiways and other ground support facilities for the planned jet.

The new facility will employ 675 people, with Aerion citing Florida's association with high tech flight, and its connected workforce, as a key reason for choosing the location. The coastline east of Orlando is known as the Space Coast for its connection to America's space program.

[...] The AS2 will fly at mach 1.4, or 1715 km/h. The company says the jet would carry between eight and 12 passengers and could make the flight from New York to London in 4.5 hours, compared with about seven hours for regular commercial planes. It would cut at least four hours off the flight time between New York and Sydney, which took more than 19 hours on a Qantas test flight in 2019.

[...] Aerion plans to build 300 AS2 jets in its first 10 years of production. The plane will have a price tag of $US120 million.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for requerdanos

Social inequality was "recorded on the bones" of Cambridge's medieval residents, according to a new study of hundreds of human remains excavated from three very different burial sites within the historic city centre.

University of Cambridge researchers examined the remains of 314 individuals dating from the 10th to the 14th century and collected evidence of "skeletal trauma" – a barometer for levels of hardship endured in life.

Bones were recovered from across the social spectrum: a parish graveyard for ordinary working people, a charitable "hospital" where the infirm and destitute were interred, and an Augustinian friary that buried wealthy donors alongside clergy.

[...] "By comparing the skeletal trauma of remains buried in various locations within a town like Cambridge, we can gauge the hazards of daily life experienced by different spheres of medieval society," said Dr Jenna Dittmar, study lead author from the After the Plague project at the University's Department of Archaeology.

[...] "We can see this inequality recorded on the bones of medieval Cambridge residents. However, severe trauma was prevalent across the social spectrum. Life was toughest at the bottom – but life was tough all over."

Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/medievalinequality

Journal Reference:
Jenna M. Dittmar, Piers D. Mitchell, Craig Cessford, et al. Medieval injuries: Skeletal trauma as an indicator of past living conditions and hazard risk in Cambridge, England [open], American Journal of Physical Anthropology (DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24225)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars, but what for?:

NASA's mission to send another rover to Mars is set to culminate in a successful landing on February 18, 2021, but that's not all the agency is sending to the Red Planet.

The Perseverance rover – once it lands next month – will begin scouring a section of Mars that astronomers believe could have hosted and supported microbial life in the past.

But a second passenger aboard the lander vehicle will be meant to do something else entirely.

The Mars Helicopter – also known as Ingenuity – will deploy alongside the rover, and will be NASA's attempt at trying to achieve successful controlled flight on Mars for the very first time.

Ingenuity weighs only four pounds, and is described as a "small, but mighty passenger". Though it has a fuselage (main body) no bigger than a tissue box, it's supposedly strong enough to brave the harsh weather conditions on the planet during flight.

Started as a wishful project about six years ago, the engineers behind Ingenuity understood that while it was theoretically possible to fly in Mars' super-thin atmosphere, there was no real conviction that they'd be able to build a vehicle that could fly, communicate, and survive on its own on Mars.

But after rounds of research and testing, the team have managed to create a flying vehicle that has so far survived all tests emulating Mars' environment, and the next step is to make it fly on the Red Planet for real.

Original Submission

Inspired by an IRC submission for c0lo:

Google open sources Tilt Brush VR software as it shuts down internal development

As Facebook and Apple begin to fire up more projects in the AR/VR world, Google has spent the last year shutting down most of their existing projects in that space.

Today, the folks at Google announced they had ended active development of Tilt Brush, a VR painting app that was one of virtual reality's early hit pieces of software. The app allowed users to use virtual reality controllers as brushes to construct digital sculptures and environments.

While the company will not be pushing any new updates to the app, they did announce that they will be open sourcing the code on github for developers to build their own experiences and customizations. Google also notes that the app will continue to be available in the app stores on VR headsets.

Additional coverage at TheVerge, BBC News, and Engadget.

Google's blog post about the matter.

What is Tilt Brush?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Should a self-driving car kill the baby or the grandma? Depends on where you're from.:

In 2014 researchers at the MIT Media Lab designed an experiment called Moral Machine. The idea was to create a game-like platform that would crowdsource people's decisions on how self-driving cars should prioritize lives in different variations of the "trolley problem." In the process, the data generated would provide insight into the collective ethical priorities of different cultures.

The researchers never predicted the experiment's viral reception. Four years after the platform went live, millions of people in 233 countries and territories have logged 40 million decisions, making it one of the largest studies ever done on global moral preferences.

A new paper published in Nature presents the analysis of that data and reveals how much cross-cultural ethics diverge on the basis of culture, economics, and geographic location.

[...] Awad hopes the results will also help technologists think more deeply about the ethics of AI beyond self-driving cars. "We used the trolley problem because it's a very good way to collect this data, but we hope the discussion of ethics don't stay within that theme," he said. "The discussion should move to risk analysis—about who is at more risk or less risk—instead of saying who's going to die or not, and also about how bias is happening." How these results could translate into the more ethical design and regulation of AI is something he hopes to study more in the future.

"In the last two, three years more people have started talking about the ethics of AI," Awad said. "More people have started becoming aware that AI could have different ethical consequences on different groups of people. The fact that we see people engaged with this—I think that that's something promising."

Journal Reference:
Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, et al. The Moral Machine experiment, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Ten-Year Old Sudo Vulnerability Gives Root Privileges on Host:

A major security hole in the Sudo utility could be abused by unprivileged users to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host, Qualys reports.

Designed to allow users to run programs with the security privileges of another user (by default superuser, hence the name, which is derived from 'superuser do'), Sudo is present in major Unix- and Linux-based operating systems out there.

Tracked as CVE-2021-3156, the recently identified vulnerability, which Qualys refers to as "Baron Samedit," was introduced in July 2011, and can be exploited to gain root privileges using a default Sudo configuration.

This means that an attacker able to compromise a low-privileged account on the machine could abuse the vulnerability to gain root access.

All legacy versions of Sudo, from 1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2, as well as the utility's stable releases from 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1 are affected, in their default configuration.

[...] Qualys, which provides an in-depth technical analysis of the vulnerability, has published a proof-of-concept video to demonstrate how the issue can be exploited.

Also at Bleeping Computer.

CVE-2021-3156: Heap-Based Buffer Overflow in Sudo (Baron Samedit)

CVE-2021-3156

Original Submission

The Complete Moron’s Guide to GameStop’s Stock Roller Coaster

Freeman writes:

The Complete Moron’s Guide to GameStop’s Stock Roller Coaster:

Last week, an epic short squeeze had driven GameStop stock up to $40 a share, a roughly 1,500 percent increase from its low point nine months ago. Little did anyone know at the time that this would only be the beginning of the story.

As I write this, GameStop's stock price is hovering around $350, up another 775 percent or so since I wrote about this situation eight days ago. By the time you read this, that number may be horribly outdated, as the stock continues to bounce up and down with extreme volatility hour by hour (it dipped down as low as $61 and peaked as high as $159 on Friday).

The current stock price now gives the company a market cap of about $26 billion.

On the surface, that means the market currently thinks GameStop is worth more than twice as much now (during a potentially existential threat to brick and mortar game sales) as it was during the height of the Wii boom in late 2007, when console game downloads were barely a thing.

Also at: Business Insider.

Melvin Capital, Hedge Fund Targeted by Reddit Board, Closes out of GameStop Short Position

takyon writes:

Melvin Capital, hedge fund targeted by Reddit board, closes out of GameStop short position:

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/84-of-mexican-hand-sanitizers-toxic-or-flawed-fda-issues-drastic-alert/

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday issued a first-of-its-kind alert to try to block the import of toxic hand sanitizers from Mexico, which have been flooding the market amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last June, the regulatory agency began issuing alerts and warnings for consumers about dangerous and counterfeit hand sanitizers, many of which were made in Mexico. Since then, the FDA has issued alerts on 226 products. An FDA survey conducted between April and December found that 84 percent of products tested from Mexico were not in compliance with FDA regulations.

[...] Along with spotting the dangerous products, the agency also said it began getting reports from states of methanol poisonings from sanitizers, which in some cases lead to blindness, cardiac effects, effects on the central nervous system, hospitalizations, and deaths in adults and children. The agency notes that methanol exposures can cause nausea, vomiting, headache, blurred vision, permanent blindness, seizures, coma, permanent damage to the nervous system, or death. Though the products pose risks to anyone using the sanitizers properly—they can be absorbed through the skin—the products are most dangerous to small children who may drink them out of curiosity or adults who drink them as an alcohol substitute.

Previously:
Toxic Methanol that Causes Blindness Found in Hand Sanitizers, FDA Warns
Toxic Hand Sanitizers Have Blinded and Killed Adults and Children, FDA Warns
Mounting Poisonings, Blindness, Deaths as Toxic Hand Sanitizers Flood Market

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, according to new research.

[...] The figures have been published today (Monday, 25 January) by a research team which is the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.

The team, led by the University of Leeds, found that the rate of ice loss from the Earth has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tons per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons per year by 2017.

Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on.

[...] Lead author Dr. Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow at Leeds' Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling , said: "Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.

[...] The increase in ice loss has been triggered by warming of the atmosphere and oceans, which have warmed by 0.26°C and 0.12°C per decade since the 1980, respectively. The majority of all ice loss was driven by atmospheric melting (68 %), with the remaining losses (32%) being driven by oceanic melting.

[...] Just over half (58 %) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (42 %) was from the southern hemisphere.

Journal Reference:
Slater, Thomas, Lawrence, Isobel R., Otosaka, Inès N., et al. Review article: Earth's ice imbalance [open], The Cryosphere (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Amazon Alexa Starts Proactively Making Decisions for You:

Amazon's Alexa knows that actions speak louder than words, which is why it can automatically complete tasks without you having to ask.

Hunches rolled out last year, reminding users to lock the front door or turn off the basement light if Alexa senses you forgot. A recent update, however, lets customers choose to have the virtual assistant proactively control compatible devices, instinctively starting the robot vacuum or adjusting the thermostat when it deems necessary.

"Customers can choose to have Alexa proactively act on Hunches without needing to ask," Amazon says. "That means customers have fewer things to think about at home, so they can spend their time on more meaningful things."

[...] The function—currently available in English in the US—improves with use; regularly ask about the daily weather forecast, and Alexa could one day automatically offer advice about an umbrella or sunscreen.

More about Alexa Hunches at Amazon:

Hunches is an optional Alexa feature that alerts you when one of your connected smart home devices isn't in its usual state. Alexa can offer a hunch after you say certain utterances, such as "Set alarm" or "Good night."

[...] If Alexa detects that a connected smart home device isn't in a state you prefer, Alexa lets you know and offers to fix it. For example, if you say "Good night" and you've forgotten to turn off a light, Alexa alerts you and offers to turn it off.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

US has 'moral imperative' to develop AI weapons, says panel:

The US should not agree to ban the use or development of autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI) software, a government-appointed panel has said in a draft report for Congress.

The panel, led by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, on Tuesday concluded two days of public discussion about how the world’s biggest military power should consider AI for national security and technological advancement.

Its vice-chairman, Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said autonomous weapons are expected to make fewer mistakes than humans do in battle, leading to reduced casualties or skirmishes caused by target misidentification.

“It is a moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis,” he said.

[...] Mary Wareham, coordinator of the eight-year Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, said the commission’s “focus on the need to compete with similar investments made by China and Russia … only serves to encourage arms races.”

More Info:

• The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Draft Report
• Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google's the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome. Since the project's inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that's almost the same as the closed-source Chrome. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.

[...] To the average Chromium user, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn't apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/26/whats-the-deal-with-chromium-on-linux-google-at-odds-with-package-maintainers/

Original Submission

Eratosthenes writes:

CNET says:

SpaceX and its Crew Dragon spacecraft have been a bright spot in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which returned astronaut launches to US soil in 2020. Boeing, the other Commercial Crew provider, still has some work to do before it carries a NASA crew to the International Space Station.

On Monday, NASA announced a new target date of March 25 to launch the second uncrewed test flight of Boeing's Starliner. Last fall, NASA had been aiming for March 29, so the new date pushes up the target by a few days. The mission is called Orbital Flight Test-2, or OFT-2.

Developing spacecraft is challenging, and hurdles and delays are a normal part of the process.

The first major CST-100 Starliner flight test in late 2019 didn't go as planned. The spacecraft failed to reach the ISS, but it did return to Earth safely. An investigation turned up software defects and a communications link problem. Boeing vowed to conduct a second orbital flight test to prove the spacecraft's safety before it carries humans on board.

Previously:
Boeing and NASA Target December for Second Try at Uncrewed Orbital Demonstration Flight

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The $50 Ham: A Cheap Antenna For The HF Bands:

So far in the $50 Ham series, I've concentrated mainly on the VHF and UHF bands. The reason for this has to do mainly with FCC rules, which largely restrict Technician-level licensees to those bands. But there's a financial component to it, too; high-frequency (HF) band privileges come both at the price of learning enough about radio to pass the General license test, as well as the need for gear that can be orders of magnitude more expensive than a $30 handy-talkie radio.

But while HF gear can be expensive, not everything needed to get on the air has to be so. And since it's often the antenna that makes or breaks an amateur radio operator's ability to make contacts, we'll look at a simple but versatile antenna design that can be adapted to support everything from a big, powerful base station to portable QRP (low-power) activations in the field: the end-fed half-wave antenna.

Original Submission