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Biden signs $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, making $1,400 checks and child tax credit official:

President Joe Biden on Thursday signed the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which includes a third stimulus check, for up to $1,400, and an expanded child tax credit. The IRS and Treasury will begin to send the new stimulus checks as soon as this weekend, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday at a press briefing.

The bill signing comes just one day after the amended bill passed in the House by a vote of 220-211. The House initially passed the bill on Feb. 26, and the Senate approved it last week, albeit with some changes.

[...] Democrats had been pushing to get the stimulus package signed into law before current unemployment benefits expire March 14. Biden was originally scheduled to sign the bill on Friday, but it got moved forward after Congress sent the final bill to the president more quickly than anticipated, Psaki said on Thursday.

The stimulus package, called the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, includes changes made by the Senate last week, such as reducing income limits for the third stimulus payment and lowering proposed weekly unemployment benefits from $400 a week to $300 a week (though they'd extend through Sept. 6 rather than the end of August). The Senate also dropped a federal minimum wage increase from the legislation, but proponents say they'll reintroduce that at a later date.

How to watch President Biden's national address tonight.

DeathMonkey writes:

House passes $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, sends it to Biden to sign:

[...] Here are the proposal's major pieces:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Google Science Fair teen found way to remove microplastics from water:

Fionn Ferreira lives on a remote island in West Cork, a seaside region in southern Ireland. One day while kayaking, he spotted a rock on the shore that was coated in oil from a recent spill. Attached to the rock were tiny bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters long — what scientists call "microplastics."

[...] Because microplastics are so small — about the size of a sesame seed — scientists have struggled to find ways to remove them from the environment. But Ferreira discovered something when he saw the oil-coated rock on the shore.

[...] Plastic and oil are nonpolar, meaning they're likely to stick to one another in nature. As a budding scientist, Ferreira had a hunch that the same effect could be created using a magnetic liquid found in speakers and electronic devices.

On Monday, Ferreira won the Google Science Fair's $50,000 grand prize for his experiment, which showed that the liquid could extract microplastics from water.

[...] In 1963, the NASA engineer Steve Papell came up with a way to make rocket fuel magnetic so that it could move around in zero gravity during the Apollo missions. In the process, he wound up creating the first ferrofluid, essentially a magnetic liquid.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Verkada surveillance cameras at Tesla, hundreds more businesses breached: hackers:

A small group of hackers viewed live and archived surveillance footage from hundreds of businesses including Tesla Inc by gaining administrative access to camera maker Verkada over the past two days, one of the people involved in the breach told Reuters.

Swiss software developer Tillie Kottmann, who has gained attention for finding security flaws in mobile apps and other systems, shared screenshots on Twitter from inside a Tesla warehouse in California and an Alabama jail in messages to Reuters. Kottmann declined to identify other members of the group.

Kottmann said they sought to draw attention to the pervasive monitoring of people after having found login information for Verkada's administrative tools publicly online this week.

Verkada acknowledged an intrusion, saying it had disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent unauthorized access.

"Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified law enforcement" and customers, the company said.

Kottmann said Verkada cut off the hackers' access hours before Bloomberg first reported the breach on Tuesday.

The hacking group, if it had chosen, could have used its control of the camera gear to access other parts of company networks at Tesla and software makers Cloudflare Inc and Okta Inc, according to Kottmann.

Tesla, Cloudflare and Okta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Also at Bloomburg, Yahoo, Verkada, BBC, and Engadget among others.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

1.6-GW Coal Plant May Get New Life as Green Hydrogen Hub:

Global technology heavyweights Shell and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Swedish state-owned energy firm Vattenfall, and German municipal heat generator Wärme Hamburg are teaming on a massive project to repurpose a 2015-commissioned 1.6-GW coal plant in northern Germany as a massive green hydrogen hub.

[...] In January, Vattenfall, MHI, Shell, and Wärme Hamburg said the Moorburg site was ideally suited to the envisioned "Green Energy Hub" (Figure 2). "It is connected to both the national 380,000-volt transmission network and the 110,000-volt network of the City of Hamburg. In addition, overseas ships can call at the location directly and use the quay and port facilities as an import terminal," they noted in a joint statement. "The municipal gas network company also intends to expand a hydrogen network in the port within ten years and is already working on the necessary distribution infrastructure. Numerous potential customers for green hydrogen are located near the site, thus enabling the project to cover the entire hydrogen value chain—from generation to storage, transport, and utilization in various sectors."

[...] While it is unclear which technology the partners are considering for the 100-MW power-to-gas converters, Fabian Ziegler, CEO of Shell in Germany, noted that the project may encapsulate the "entire value chain for hydrogen"—from power production from "offshore wind to the expansion of capacities for green hydrogen production as well as to the supply for mobility or transport applications and other industries." Christian Heine, CEO of Wärme Hamburg GmbH and Gasnetz Hamburg GmbH, meanwhile, said that outside of the project's "enormous potential" as a means for power storage, the project could provide "climate neutral heat."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The invention that made mass vaccinations possible:

Hundreds of millions of adults around the world can expect to be vaccinated against Covid over the next few months. It will be delivered by hypodermic syringe - but who invented it?

[...] The syringe that is now being used to provide protection against Covid may look simple enough - but appearances can be deceptive.

It took millennia to create the hypodermic syringe in a form that was to allow mass vaccinations to take place today.

An Irish surgeon, Francis Rynd, and French physician, Charles Pravaz, made a huge contribution to the field in the mid-19th Century.

But it was a Scottish doctor, Alexander Wood, who is now widely credited with inventing the modern-day hypodermic syringe.

Wood may have had little idea of the importance of his invention in the 1850s.

But his creation of an all-glass syringe with plunger and fine-bore needle was to become as recognisable a medical device as the stethoscope.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Using Nmap results to help harden Linux systems:

System security is not a one-and-done task. Rather, there are numerous layers to an organization's approach to security. Some of those layers are physical security to the datacenters, regular patching and maintenance of the infrastructure, continuing user awareness education, and scanning systems for issues. This article discusses how to use the nmap and nc commands to scan a system so that you can determine the appropriate next steps. I use a few systems in my examples here. The system that does the scanning is my local Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 computer, opendemo.usersys.redhat.com is the Red Hat Satellite 6.8 system used because it has several open ports, and I have various target systems.

[...] Now that you've been able to get a detailed report of what's running on your systems, what do you do next? The first thing is to be sure that there are no unexpected ports open. For this, verify with the applications team, security teams, and your coworkers might be appropriate. Next is to ensure that the exposed services are properly secured. This means taking steps such as making sure that all software is updated, updated ciphers are supported, insecure protocols are not in use, and default passwords for the services have been changed.

[Ed Note - The fine article then walks you through a good, basic auditing of some security issues you can identify using nmap. Some uses include:

• Basic Scans
• Verifying Certificates
• Identifying Services

]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Twitter Launches Five-Strike System to Ban Users Who Spread Covid-19 Lies:

Twitter will ban users who spread misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and covid-19 vaccines under a new five-strike system, according to a new blog post from the social media company. Twitter bans all medical information that's "demonstrably false or misleading and may lead to significant risk of harm."

"Through the use of the strike system, we hope to educate people on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the opportunity to further consider their behavior and their impact on the public conversation," Twitter's Safety Team wrote on Monday [(March 1)].

"Individuals will be notified directly when a label or required Tweet removal results in additional account-level enforcement. Repeated violations of the COVID-19 policy are enforced against on the basis of the number of strikes an account has accrued for violations of the policy," the blog post continued. [...]

• One strike: no account-level action
• Two strikes: 12-hour account lock
• Three strikes: 12-hour account lock
• Four strikes: 7-day account lock
• Five or more strikes: permanent suspension

Twitter's new five-strike policy comes after the company announced in December that it would be taking new actions to "protect the public conversation" around covid-19, a disease that has infected over 28.6 million Americans and killed more than 516,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

T-Mobile will sell your web usage data to advertisers unless you opt out:

"[S]tarting April 26, 2021, T‑Mobile will begin a new program that uses some data we have about you, including information we learn from your web and device usage data (like the apps installed on your device) and interactions with our products and services for our own and 3rd party advertising, unless you tell us not to," T-Mobile said in a privacy notice. "When we share this information with third parties, it is not tied to your name or information that directly identifies you."

For directions on how to opt out of the expanded data sharing, see the first section of the T-Mobile privacy notice.

T-Mobile, which completed its purchase of Sprint in April 2020, said that the new advertising "program changes the way Sprint offered choices for sharing in the past, as this data was previously used only if you indicated that it was OK with you first."

[...] T-Mobile says in another webpage describing its advertising and analytics program that it collects "addresses of websites visited; types of websites visited, like sports sites, music sites, etc.; applications, content, and features used—including how much time you spent using them, and information from servers that host these apps, content, and features."

[...] In order to anonymize data before it's sold to third parties, T-Mobile said that it ties the information "to your mobile advertising identifier or another unique identifier" instead of the customer's name. But you'll have to take T-Mobile's word on just how anonymous the anonymized data actually is. "[P]rivacy groups say those IDs can be linked back to people by comparing different data sets," The Wall Street Journal noted in an article on the T-Mobile changes today.

[...] The Obama-era FCC tried to require home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before using, sharing, or selling Web browsing and app usage histories, but a Republican-controlled Congress and then-President Trump killed the rule in 2017 before it took effect.

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takyon writes:

Russia turns away from NASA, says it will work with China on a Moon base

The heads of the Chinese and Russian space agencies signed an agreement on Tuesday to work together to build a "scientific" station on the Moon.

Under terms of a memorandum of understanding, the two countries will cooperate on creation of an "International Lunar Science Station" and plan to invite other countries to participate. The agreement was signed by Zhang Kejian, director of the China National Space Administration, and Dmitry Rogozin, the chief of Russia's space corporation, Roscosmos. The agreement was announced by Roscosmos.

Details about the project were fairly sparse, specifying only that the countries would work together to create research facilities on the surface and/or in orbit around the Moon. The goal was both to establish long-term, uncrewed facilities on the Moon and build up the capabilities for a human presence there.

[...] This latest Russia-China agreement suggests the enduring relationship that NASA and Roscosmos have enjoyed for decades may come to a breaking point when it comes to deep space exploration. And while the term "space race" is certainly a cliché, that may nonetheless be what NASA and its partners find themselves in with China and Russia when it comes to returning to the Moon.

Also at BBC.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Tesla: "Full self-driving beta" isn't designed for full self-driving:

The transparency site PlainSite recently published a pair of letters Tesla wrote to the California Department of Motor Vehicles in late 2020. The letters cast doubt on Elon Musk's optimistic timeline for the development of fully driverless technology.

[...] In October, Tesla released what it called its "full self-driving beta" software to a few dozen Tesla owners. A few days ago, Musk announced plans to expand the program to more customers.

Given that the product is called "full self-driving," this might seem like the first step in Musk's three-step progression. After a few more months of testing, perhaps it will become reliable enough to operate without human supervision. That could allow Musk to make good on his latest optimistic timeline for Autopilot: in a December 2020 interview, Musk said he was "extremely confident" that Tesla vehicles would reach level 5 by the end of 2021.

But a letter Tesla sent to California regulators the same month had a different tone. Despite the "full self-driving" name, Tesla admitted it doesn't consider the current beta software suitable for fully driverless operation. The company said it wouldn't start testing "true autonomous features" until some unspecified point in the future.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Adobe Critical Code-Execution Flaws Plague Windows Users:

Adobe has issued patches for a slew of critical security vulnerabilities, which, if exploited, could allow for arbitrary code execution on vulnerable Windows systems.

Affected products include Adobe's Framemaker document processor, designed for writing and editing large or complex documents; Adobe's  Connect software used for remote web conferencing; and the Adobe Creative Cloud software suite for video editing.

"Adobe is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in these updates," according to an Adobe spokesperson.

Adobe fixed a critical flaw (CVE-2021-21056) in Framemaker, which could allow for arbitrary code execution if exploited. The vulnerability is an out-of-bounds read error; which is a type of buffer-overflow flaw where the software reads data past the end of the intended buffer. An attacker who can read out-of-bounds memory might be able to get "secret values" (like memory addresses) that could ultimately allow him to achieve code execution or denial of service.

[...] Adobe also fixed three critical vulnerabilities in the desktop application version of Adobe Creative Cloud for Windows users.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

World's First Supersonic Unmanned Combat Drone Reaches Speeds Of Over 1,500mph:

A new combat drone has been created that can hit speeds of more than 1,500mph [(2,400 kph)].

The drone is much bigger than the ones you'll have seen floating around your local parks, however, and looks more like a small spaceship.

Created by Kelley Aerospace, the supersonic drone is made up of carbon fibre and is completely unmanned; it can exceed the speed of sound, hitting an astonishing Mach 2.1

[...] Not only is the drone extremely fast, it's built for multiple combat or reconnaissance roles and 'is designed for a reduced radar cross-section and infrared signature,' the company explained. 'The carbon fibre and monocoque design endows the Arrow with outstanding strength and stiffness,' they added, MailOnline reports.

[...] The drone is able to fly almost 5,000km with a maximum take-off weight of 16,800kg (37,040lb) and still reach speeds of Mach 2.1.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

LiquidVPN Faces Lawsuit for Allegedly Promoting Pirating Content:

LiquidVPN is now facing a lawsuit from pissed-off movie copyright holders that argue the provider purposefully billed itself as a haven for copyright infringers looking to pirate their favorite TV shows and movies and should be held liable for its users' misdeeds.

[...] The rights owners are suing 1701 Management and its owner Charles Muszynski, which they allege own LiquidVPN, for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. In their complaint, they particularly call out several of the site's promotional materials that appear to fly in the face of the law.

"The LiquidVPN Defendants actively promote their LiquidVPN Service for the purpose of movie piracy, including of infringing Plaintiffs' Works. The LiquidVPN Defendants' website includes a statement that their VPN service is the 'Best VPN for Torrenting and P2P Filesharing today' over the image of the notorious movie piracy website Pirate Bay," the lawsuit reads.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New Samsung 980 SSD improves on 970 EVO, EVO Plus performance:

Samsung's newest generation of midgrade consumer NVMe storage is out today—the new drive is simply dubbed the "Samsung 980," without any suffix. The reviewer guide Samsung provided us compares the new drive to last generation's 970 EVO—we didn't have a 970 EVO on hand, but we did have a 970 EVO Plus and a 970 Pro, so those are the prior-generation drives we'll compare the new 980 to today.

[...] As the data density of NAND cells goes up, their speed and write endurance decreases—it takes more time and effort to read or write one of eight discrete voltage levels to a cell than it does to get or set a simple, unambiguous on/off value.

To a certain degree, this disadvantage can be overcome with parallelism—by splitting the same 1MiB write between eight banks of NAND, you can get much lower latency and higher throughput than you would if the entire 1MiB had to be written to a single bank. This is the major reason that even within the same SSD model, larger capacity SSDs are almost always faster than smaller ones.

In order to accelerate writes beyond that, you need a faster buffer area—which you can get simply by configuring part of your NAND as faster-moving, higher-endurance SLC[*]. The physical media doesn't really need to be different; your SSD controller simply needs to know to treat it that way.

In earlier versions of Samsung SSDs, the SLC buffer area was fixed—but beginning with the 960 EVO, Samsung controllers introduced what it brands "Intelligent" Turbowrite, which is a dynamic amount of SLC buffer configurable by the controller itself. In the 960 EVO and 970 EVO, the "Intelligent" buffer area was a subset of the total SLC cache—the 980 introduces a much larger and, for the first time, entirely dynamic SLC cache.

[*] SLC: Single-Level Cell
MLC: Multi-Level Cell
TLC: Triple-Level Cell

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A potential model for a real physical warp drive:

A pair of researchers at Applied Physics has created what they describe as the first general model for a warp drive, a model for a space craft that could travel faster than the speed of light, without actually breaking the laws of physics.

[...] Imagine a napkin. If you had to traverse its entire surface, it would take a certain amount of time. But what if you folded the napkin in half and moved through and across the folds? You could get to your destination in almost no time. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a previous idea based on warping space-time a step further to create a model for a warp drive that they believe could be feasible in the future.

[...] Bobrick and Martire suggest instead that a massive gravitational force could be used to bend space time. The trick is finding a way to compress a planet-sized mass to a manageable spacecraft-module size in order to use its gravity. Because of the implied difficulties, a warp drive created from the model developed by the researchers could not be built today, but it does suggest that someday it might be possible.

Journal Reference:
Alexey Bobrick, Gianni Martire. Introducing Physical Warp Drives, Classical and Quantum Gravity (DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/abdf6e)

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