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takyon writes:

Jeff Bezos to step down as Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy to take over in Q3

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will step down later this year, turning the helm over to the company's top cloud executive Andy Jassy.

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and has led Amazon's Web Services cloud team since its inception.

Bezos said he will stay engaged in important Amazon projects but will also have more time to focus on the Bezos Earth Fund, his Blue Origin spaceship company, The Washington Post and the Amazon Day 1 Fund.

[...] Bezos will transition to executive chairman of Amazon's board.

Also at The Guardian and TechCrunch, Ars Technica, CNET, and Mashable

See also: Jeff Bezos to step down as Amazon CEO after record-smashing 2020 ends with first $100-billion quarter

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Family Photo Snapped by Solar Orbiter Shows Venus, Earth And Mars Gleaming Like Stars:

Every now and again, we get a little glimpse of just how far human ingenuity has gone.

Quite literally: The above image was taken by a spacecraft travelling through the Solar System while it was at a distance of 251 million kilometres (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between Earth and the Sun by nearly half again.

It was snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on 18 November 2020, while en route to its destination. It joins a burgeoning tradition of photos of Earth taken by instruments far beyond where humans ourselves can venture.

But it's not just Earth in Solar Orbiter's image; Venus and Mars make an appearance, too, 48 million and 332 million kilometres from the spacecraft, respectively. It's a lovely family portrait when you think about it – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very different from each other – seen through a scientific instrument – the Heliospheric Imager – designed to study the heart of the Solar System.

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martyb writes:

Elon Musk's SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospital:

SpaceX announced Monday that it would fly a crew of private citizens into orbit around the Earth, potentially by the end of the year, in a multiday mission designed to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

[...] [SpaceX] plans to fly a crew of four — all private citizens — to the International Space Station early next year.

The flight announced Monday would mark another significant milestone in the privatization of spaceflight, as private companies erode governments' long-held monopoly on human spaceflight. It is being funded by Jared Isaacman, the 37-year-old founder and chief executive of Shift4 Payments, a payments technology company. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot who flies commercial and military aircraft, would command the mission and is donating two of the seats to St. Jude.

One is going to a yet-to-be named health-care worker at the hospital. The other seat would be raffled off, in an attempt to raise at least $200 million for St. Jude.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In recent years these release windows have slowly decreased and this process was accelerated in the COVID pandemic. Increasingly, traditional delays have come down, and in some cases, release windows have disappeared completely. Warner Bros, for example, now releases movies on HBO Max and in theaters simultaneously.

This shift is nothing short of a historic breakthrough. While more choice is good for consumers, these changes also breed uncertainty. Some movie industry insiders and theater owners, for example, fear that their income will be negatively impacted. At the same time, there are concerns that piracy will spike.

These and other questions are addressed in new research conducted by Carnegie Mellon's Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA). The research group, which received millions of dollars in gifts from the Motion Picture Association, just analyzed how early releases affect piracy and box office revenue.

The results are published in a non-peer-reviewed paper titled The Impact of Early Digital Movie Releases on Box Office Revenue: Evidence from the Korean Market.

South Korea is the fourth largest movie market according to the article. I wonder how representative these results are of the top three (US, China, Japan)?

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/research-movie-release-window-boost-revenue-not-piracy-210127/

Journal Reference:
Liang, Yangfan, Burtch, Gordon, Cho, Daegon, et al. The Impact of Early Digital Movie Releases on Box Office Revenue: Evidence from the Korean Market, (DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3749476)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A hacker by the name of [ea] has figured out how to get a root shell on the Bosch LCN2kai head unit of their 2015 Xterra, and it looks like the process should be the same for other vehicles in the Nissan family such as the Rogue, Sentra, Altima, and Frontier. If you want to play along at home, all you have to do is write the provided image to a USB flash drive and insert it.

Now for those of us who are a more interested in how this whole process works, [ea] was kind of enough to provide a very detailed account of how the exploit was discovered. Starting with getting a spare Linux-powered head unit out of a crashed Xterra to experiment with, the write-up takes the reader through each discovery and privilege escalation that ultimately leads to the development of a non-invasive hack that doesn't require the user to pull their whole dashboard apart to run.

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DeathMonkey writes:

Oregon law to decriminalize all drugs goes into effect, offering addicts rehab instead of prison:

"I lived in the bottom for years," says [Janie] Gullickson, 52. "For me and people like me, I laid there and wallowed in it for a long time."

But if she has to pick the lowest point – one that lasted years, not days, she says – it came shortly after she hit 30 in 1998. At that time, Gullickson had five kids, ages 5 to 11, by four different men. She came home from work one day as a locksmith to find that her ex-husband had taken her two youngest and left the state. Horrified, devastated and convinced that this was the beginning of the end, her life spiraled: She dropped her other son off with his dad, left her two daughters with her mom and soon became an IV meth user.

In prison six years later, Gullickson was contemplating joining an intensive recovery program when a "striking, magnetic gorgeous Black woman walked in the room, held up a mug shot and started talking about being in the very chairs where we were sitting," Gullickson remembers. There was life on the other side of addiction and prison, the woman said. But you have to fight for it. Gullickson believed her.

"I remember thinking, I may not be able to do all that, be what she was, but maybe I could do something different than this," Gullickson says. "That day, I felt the door open to change and healing."

AnonTechie writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an interesting analysis on why this project failed.

Alphabet's Loon Failed to Bring Internet to the World -- What Went Wrong?

Loon's soaring promise to bring Internet access to the world via high-altitude balloons deflated last week, when the company announced that it will be shutting down. With the announcement, Loon became the latest in a list of tech companies that have been unable to realize the lofty goal of universal Internet access.

The company, a subsidiary of Alphabet (which also includes the subsidiary of Google), sought to bring the Internet to remote communities that were otherwise too difficult to connect.

It's not entirely surprising that Loon wasn't able to close the global connectivity gap, even though the shutdown announcement itself seemingly came out of the blue. While the company had experienced some success in early trials and initial deployments, the reality is that the inspiring mission to "connect the next (or last) billion users" touted by tech companies is more difficult than they often realize.

[...] Any network deployment is going to cost money, of course. And part of the problem with companies like Loon, according to Sonia Jorge, is that they expect unreasonable returns. Jorge is the executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), a global initiative to reduce the costs of Internet access, particularly in developing areas. In the tech industry, "very fast growth has yielded expectations of very high and very fast returns," Jorge says, but in reality, such returns are uncommon. That goes double for companies connecting poorer or more remote communities.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Israeli company StoreDot recently announced it can now mass produce electric vehicle batteries that can be fully charged in just five minutes. "The bottleneck to extra-fast charging is no longer the battery," claimed the firm's chief executive. But is this fast-charging battery really a gamechanger? And if so: exactly how?

Electric vehicle charging speeds are a minefield and can be tough to understand. The latest models claim peak charging rates of over 900 miles in an hour, but the average rate when charging from 10% to 80% of battery capacity is typically about half that. The last bit of the battery is surprisingly hard to "stuff": beyond 80%, and outside normal operating temperatures, rapid charging slows dramatically.

Even if you understand the capability of your car and its battery, the rate of charging is also constrained by the capacity of the charger itself. The UK, for instance, only has a handful of what we regard today as "ultrafast" chargers capable of delivering over 100 kilowatts.

[...] Fast charging batteries could also reduce the environmental impact of cars and other battery devices. For most drivers, who only occasionally do long journeys, a car with a smaller, lighter battery, which will also be more efficient and cheaper, may be more attractive since there will be less inconvenience from charging stops. This could also have beneficial implications for other battery uses: perhaps you don't need two batteries for your power tools if you can recharge in just one minute?

Source: https://theconversation.com/how-superfast-charging-batteries-can-help-sell-the-transition-to-electric-vehicles-153872

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

All but two US states — Montana and Wyoming— now have police or fire departments participating in Amazon's Ring network, which lets law enforcement ask users for footage from their Ring security cameras to assist with investigations, the Financial Times reported[.] Figures from Ring show more than 1,189 departments joined the program in 2020 for a total of 2,014. That's up sharply from 703 departments in 2019 and just 40 in 2018.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-partners-police-fire-security-privacy-cameras

Gizmodo adds:

[The Financial Times] reported that in 2020, the departments collectively requested videos related to more than 22,335 incidents.

Police don't need a warrant to request the videos, and owners can decline to provide their Ring's footage. Nonetheless, the scenario changes when subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants are involved, per the Times, because Amazon can be forced to comply with these legal requests and provide footage and "identifying data" even if the owner of the doorbell has denied access.

[...] While Ring has maintained that its program gives law enforcement more resources to solve crimes, critics accuse it of building a "for-profit private surveillance network." Meanwhile, legal experts and privacy advocates worry that the network and the program could threaten civil liberties and turn Ring users into police informants. It could also make innocent people undergo unnecessary surveillance.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The COHERENT particle physics experiment at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has firmly established the existence of a new kind of neutrino interaction. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral and interact only weakly with matter, the quest to observe this interaction drove advances in detector technology and has added new information to theories aiming to explain mysteries of the cosmos.

"The neutrino is thought to be at the heart of many open questions about the nature of the universe," said Indiana University physics professor Rex Tayloe. He led the installation, operation and data analysis of a cryogenic liquid argon detector for neutrinos at the Spallation Neutron Source, or SNS, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL.

The study, published in Physical Review Letters, observed that low-energy neutrinos interact with an argon nucleus through the weak nuclear force in a process called coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, or CEvNS, which is pronounced "sevens." Like a ping-pong ball bombarding a softball, a neutrino that hits a nucleus transfers only a small amount of energy to the much larger nucleus, which recoils almost imperceptibly in response to the tiny assault.

Laying the groundwork for the discovery made with the argon nucleus was a 2017 study published in Science in which COHERENT collaborators used the world's smallest neutrino detector to provide the first evidence of the CEvNS process as neutrinos interacted with larger and heavier cesium and iodine nuclei. Their recoils were even tinier, like bowling balls reacting to ping-pong balls.

[...] "We're looking for ways to break the Standard Model. We love the Standard Model; it's been really successful. But there are things it just doesn't explain," said physicist Jason Newby, ORNL's lead for COHERENT. "We suspect that in these small places where the model might break down, answers to big questions about the nature of the universe, antimatter and dark matter, for instance, could lie in wait."

Journal References:
1.) D. Akimov et al. First Measurement of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering on Argon, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.012002)
2.) D. Akimov, J. B. Albert, P. An, et al. Observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao0990)

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PastTense writes:

Apple CEO sounds warning of algorithms pushing society towards catastrophe:

"At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement -- the longer the better -- and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible," he said.

"What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups, and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?"

Cook touched on the recent US Capitol riots in Washington, saying the time was over to pretend there are no costs to boosting conspiracy theories and incitements to violence simply because users get engaged.

Facebook and Twitter are major examples of what Cook is talking about.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

We do not cover "The Markets" so much on SoylentNews, unless of course it has to do with COVID-19 cures, but just had to submit this, because of the term, "Reddit Horde". Yes, truly, the barbarians are at the gates, and not just Bill Gates (even though I still need to run Windows to play my Wall Street simulation games).

Reportage ex Bloomberg, by way of Yahoo.

(Bloomberg) -- Retail sites were overwhelmed with demand for silver bars and coins on Sunday, suggesting the Reddit-inspired frenzy that roiled commodities markets last week is spilling over into physical assets.

Sites from Money Metals and SD Bullion to JM Bullion and Apmex, the Walmart of precious metals products in North America, said they were unable to process orders until Asian markets open because of unprecedented demand for silver.

Robert Higgins, chief executive officer at Argent Asset Group LLC in Wilmington, Delaware, said he's been on the phone trading all day, with people desperate to buy gold or silver.

"It's a very, very tight physical market right now," he said. "And I don't know there's any answer to it except when things calm down or the market explodes on Sunday at 6 p.m."

Retail traders, inspired by Reddit posters, stormed into the silver market last week and successfully drove up prices of the physical metal, silver miners and exchange-traded funds. Spot prices, silver futures on the Comex and the largest silver exchange-traded fund, iShares Silver Trust, all climbed more than 5% in the week.

takyon writes:

TSMC's 'Chip-for-Vaccine' Swap To Delay Integrated Circuit Chip Production

Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has agreed to manufacture automobile processors at an expedited rate. TSMC's decision comes after governments in several continents requested the Taiwanese authorities to ask the chipmaker to increase this production - as a global shortage of the products start to emerge as a thorn in the side of the economic recovery of many countries that house automobile manufacturers affected by this shortage.

Following the request, Taiwan's Minister of Economic Affairs Ms. Mei-Hua Wang convened a meeting that involved representatives from Germany, TSMC and other semiconductor companies and the dean of Taiwan's Economic Research Institute to discuss the shortage and how Germany and other countries could help Taiwan in return for providing the aforementioned chips.

The meeting took place earlier this week on Wednesday, and a key item on the agenda was how countries including Germany could help the island in return for TSMC agreeing to step up its vehicle chip output. Specifically, the participants stressed on the need for Taiwan to procure vaccinations for the ongoing pandemic and whether nation-states could help the island in this regard.

Following this, the dean of the Taiwan Economic Research Institute stated that he was already in discussions with TSMC and that the chipmaker had agreed to cooperate to provide chips in return for the vaccines. Subsequently, TSMC confirmed on the following day that it would speed up the process for manufacturing automotive chips, with the confirmation coming soon after a second rumored price increase had been reported by The Nikkei Asian Review on Tuesday.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TheMightyBuzzard:

Facebook restores disputed posts after its Oversight Board issues first decisions:

In its first set of decisions, Facebook's Oversight Board has overturned most of the company's actions on user posts previously removed from the platform for violating the social network's standards. In 4 of the 5 cases announced Thursday — which dealt with ethnic hate speech, nudity and COVID-19 misinformation — the board decided to restore the posts.

The board's decisions are binding and Facebook will have seven days to restore content according to the board's verdicts. The company has 30 days to respond to any of the board's policy recommendations.

[...] The first set of verdicts provided insight into the decision process of the 20-member board, which is made up of legal experts, journalists and human rights advocates. The published decisions included frequent references to international human rights standards on free speech and suggested that board members favor free expression except in cases that could cause harm.

The five cases — which Facebook will use as precedents to decide on similar cases — included a decision to remove a post that pejoratively implied Muslims were inferior, a breast cancer awareness post that depicted female nipples, a post that allegedly quoted a German Nazi leader and a post that falsely claimed a cure for COVID-19 exists.

Facebook's Vice President of Content Policy Monika Bickert said the company will "take to heart" the board's suggestions. "Their recommendations will have a lasting impact on how we structure our policies," she said.

The board upheld just one of Facebook's decisions, which removed a Russian-language post that used an ethnic slur against Azerbaijanis.

Well, that's interesting.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AMD feels supply shortages will affect PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC gaming until at least 2H 2021:

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said, "overall demand exceeded planning" and CPU/GPU shortages will primarily impact gaming hardware and the low-end of the PC market. Gaming products impacted include both consoles and gaming CPUs and GPUs. This will continue until production resumes at full capacity, which may take up to 2H 2021. [...]

Ultimately, consoles such as the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X and Series S are likely to be the most affected of all until 2H 2021. [...]

[...] Adding to the supply woes is the fact that global GDDR6 shortage is expected to continue well into February and may be even beyond thus affecting all NVIDIA and AMD GPUs that use this memory standard.

Original Submission