SoylentNews

takyon writes:

AMD Unveils EPYC 'Milan' 7003 CPUs, Zen 3 Comes to 64-Core Server Chips

AMD unveiled its EPYC 7003 'Milan' processors today, claiming that the chips, which bring the company's powerful Zen 3 architecture to the server market for the first time, take the lead as the world's fastest server processor with its flagship 64-core 128-thread EPYC 7763. Like the rest of the Milan lineup, this chip comes fabbed on the 7nm process and is drop-in compatible with existing servers. AMD claims it brings up to twice the performance of Intel's competing Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, Cloud, and enterprise workloads, all while offering a vastly better price-to-performance ratio.

Milan's agility lies in the Zen 3 architecture and its chiplet-based design. This microarchitecture brings many of the same benefits that we've seen with AMD's Ryzen 5000 series chips that dominate the desktop PC market, like a 19% increase in IPC and a larger unified L3 cache. Those attributes, among others, help improve AMD's standing against Intel's venerable Xeon lineup in key areas, like single-threaded work, and offer a more refined performance profile across a broader spate of applications.

One interesting new SKU is the EPYC 7663, a 56-core, 112-thread CPU with 7 working cores on each of the 8-core chiplets. There is also a 28-core EPYC 7453.

Next up, Zen 4 "Genoa".

Also at AnandTech, The Next Platform, Phoronix, and Ars Technica.

See also: The Tour of Italy with EPYC Milan: Interview with AMD's Forrest Norrod
AMD video announcement (51m4s) and recap (10m43s)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report

Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented reality and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The Information based on internal organizational data. The number means the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people working at Facebook worldwide.

This suggests that Facebook has been significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts. As UploadVR noted in 2017, the Oculus VR division accounted for over a thousand employees at a time when Facebook's headcount was 18,770 overall, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent.

[...] The $299 Quest 2 was preordered five times as much as its predecessor, with developers seeing a boost in sales of their existing titles.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Outgoing CEO says Panasonic must cut Tesla reliance as battery tie-up evolves: FT

Panasonic Corp's outgoing Chief Executive Kazuhiro Tsuga said the company will need to reduce its heavy reliance on Tesla Inc by making batteries more compatible with electric vehicles from other global carmakers, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

"At some point, we need to graduate from our one-legged approach of relying solely on Tesla," Tsuga, who will step down after nine years as CEO from April 1, told the newspaper in an interview. "We are entering a different phase and we need to keep an eye on supplying manufacturers other than Tesla."

Panasonic Must Reduce Reliance On Tesla, Outgoing CEO Says

Let's recall the Adamas Intelligence report, which indicated that about 90% of Panasonic's batteries deployed in passenger xEVs in 2020 went to Tesla.

[...] One of the most interesting comments from the interview with Kazuhiro Tsuga is that "Currently it is difficult to sell [those batteries] unless there is a company that is able to handle our cylindrical batteries with Tesla specifications". Other major manufacturers are usually not using the cylindrical battery cell format, but rather pouch or prismatic. It appears that they also prefer easier to use cells.

Meanwhile, Tesla is reducing its reliance on Panasonic, having started development of its own cells for in-house production, and partnering with LG:

LG Energy Solution aims to build advanced battery cells for Tesla Inc electric vehicles in 2023 and is considering potential production sites in the United States and Europe, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Tesla has not yet agreed to a deal that would expand LG's role in its supply chain beyond China, one of the sources said.

See also: Tesla strikes new Panasonic battery deal as sales and shares soar
Tesla and LG in talks to produce 4680 battery cell at new factory

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The The Hitchhiker's Guide to Online Anonymity is a valuable resource for online privacy. The guide covers a number of topics and they also offer PDF downloads and more.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Not Science Fiction: German Physicists Say Traversable Wormholes Possible:

Wormholes play a key role in many science fiction films — often as a shortcut between two distant points in space. In physics, however, these tunnels in spacetime have remained purely hypothetical. An international team led by Dr. Jose Luis Blázquez-Salcedo of the University of Oldenburg has now presented a new theoretical model in the science journal Physical Review Letters that makes microscopic wormholes seem less far-fetched than in previous theories.

[...] Moreover, such a wormhole would be unstable. If for example, a spaceship were to fly into one, it would instantly collapse into a black hole — an object in which matter disappears, never to be seen again. The connection it provided to other places in the universe would be cut off. Previous models suggest that the only way to keep the wormhole open is with an exotic form of matter that has a negative mass, or in other words weighs less than nothing, and which only exists in theory.

However, Blázquez-Salcedo and his colleagues Dr. Christian Knoll from the University of Oldenburg and Eugen Radu from the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal demonstrate in their model that wormholes could also be traversable without such matter.

[...] As the physicists report in their study, it is the inclusion of the Dirac field into their model that permits the existence of a wormhole traversable by matter, provided that the ratio between the electric charge and the mass of the wormhole exceeds a certain limit. In addition to matter, signals — for example electromagnetic waves — could also traverse the tiny tunnels in spacetime. The microscopic wormholes postulated by the team would probably not be suitable for interstellar travel. Moreover, the model would have to be further refined to find out whether such unusual structures could actually exist. "We think that wormholes can also exist in a complete model," says Blázquez-Salcedo.

Journal Reference:
Jose Luis Blázquez-Salcedo, Christian Knoll, Eugen Radu. Traversable Wormholes in Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell Theory, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.101102)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Gravity Explorer Mission Still Unearthing Hidden Secrets About Our Planet:

New research published in Geophysical Journal International describes how scientists generated a new model of the lithosphere using the joint power of GOCE[*] gravity data and seismological observations combined with petrological data, which comes from the study of rocks brought to the surface and from laboratories where the extreme pressures and temperatures of Earth's interior are replicated.

Javier Fullea, from Complutense University of Madrid and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and also co-author of the paper, said, "Earlier global models of the crust or lithosphere suffered from limited resolution or were based on a single method or dataset.

"Only recently available models were able to combine multiple geophysical data, but they were often only on regional scales or they were limited by how the different data are integrated.

"For the first time, we've been able to create a new model that combines global-scale multiple terrestrial and GOCE satellite datasets in a joint inversion that describes the actual temperature and composition of mantle rocks."

Jesse Reusen, from Delft University of Technology, added, "This novel model provides an image of the present-day composition and thermal structure of the upper mantle that can be used to estimate the viscosity. In fact, it has already been used to estimate the remaining post-glacial uplift – or the rise of the land after the removal of weight of the ice – following the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet in Canada, improving our understanding of interactions between the cryosphere and the solid Earth. This research was published last year in the Journal of Geophysical Research."

The new model produced in ESA's 3D Earth study shows for the first time how dissimilar the sub-lithospheric mantle is beneath different oceans, and provides insight as to how the morphology and spreading rates of mid-oceanic ridges may be connected with the deep chemical and thermal structure.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Linux Foundation unveils Sigstore:

The Linux Foundation, Red Hat, Google, and Purdue have unveiled the free 'sigstore' service that lets developers code-sign and verify open source software to prevent supply-chain attacks.

As demonstrated by the recent dependency confusion attacks and malicious typo-squatted NPM packages, the open-source ecosystem is commonly targeted for supply-chain attacks.

To pull these attacks Zaza, threat actors will create malicious open-source packages and upload them to public repositories using names similar to popular legitimate packages. If a developer mistakenly includes the malicious package in their own project, malicious code will automatically be executed when the project is built.

[...] To prevent these types of attacks, 'sigstore' will be a free-to-use non-profit software signing service that allows developers to sign open-source software and verify their authenticity.

"You can think of it like Let's Encrypt for Code Signing. Just like how Let's Encrypt provides free certificates and automation tooling for HTTPS, sigstore provides free certificates and tooling to automate and verify signatures of source code."

"Sigstore also has the added benefit of being backed by transparency logs, which means that all the certificates and attestations are globally visible, discoverable and auditable," Google explained in a blog post today.

Sigstore is built around short-lived certificates based on OpenID Connect grants, public Transparency Logs, and a special Root CA allocated for just code-signing.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Cheer mom used deepfake nudes and threats to harass daughter's teammates, police say:

An anonymous cyberbully in Pennsylvania seemed to have one goal in mind: Force a trio of cheerleaders off their formidable local team, the Victory Vipers.

Doctored images were sent to the coach of the competitive squad that appeared to show the teen girls in humiliating or compromising situations that could get them kicked off the team, like appearing nude, drinking alcohol and using drugs, according to the criminal complaint.

In anonymous texts and calls, the bully told one girl "you should kill yourself."

When police unmasked the alleged culprit late last year, they found the bully hiding within the Victory Viper circle.

Raffaela Spone, a local cheer mom whose daughter is on the team, was charged last week with three misdemeanor counts of cyber harassment of a child and related offenses, according to the Bucks County District Attorney.

[...] If convicted, Spone could face between six months to a year in prison, though Weintraub, the district attorney, said the maximum penalty for low-level misdemeanors is unlikely.

Citron said the criminal justice system still lags behind deepfake technology when it comes to investigations and prosecutions. She and Weintraub each said deepfakes and similar technology pose a broader threat to the truth by muddying the information ecosystem.

"It's disturbing to me because we rely on being able to authenticate evidence as a foundation of the criminal justice system," Weintraub said. "If everyday people are capable of using deepfakes, that's going to make doing our job a lot more difficult."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Xiaomi national security ban suspended by US judge:

Xiaomi won a reprieve Friday when a US federal judge temporarily blocked a ban on investment in the company put in place by the Defense Department over alleged ties between the China-based phone maker and that country's military.

The US' "national security priorities are undoubtedly compelling government interests," US District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote in a memorandum accompanying his order to suspend the ban. "However, the court is somewhat skeptical that weighty national security interests are actually implicated here."

[...] The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday on Contreras' ruling. But a spokesperson told Reuters that "Xiaomi plans to continue to request that the court declare the designation unlawful and to permanently remove the designation." The Defense Department couldn't be reached for comment Saturday.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Elon Musk's Ex-Chief Engineer Creates A New Car:

Peter Rawlinson has many goals for the Lucid Air. One is that it be hailed as the world's best electric car. "Nobody believes me, but we're about to take it to another level," he says in a pre-Christmas Zoom chat from the 300-year-old Warwickshire, England, farmhouse he calls home when not at Lucid Motors' Silicon Valley headquarters.

It's the same feeling he had a decade ago as chief engineer for Tesla's Model S, the breakthrough all-electric car that took the auto world by storm in 2012. "No one believed me with Model S . . . the hostility to it was shocking. I've found the same with (Air). No one believes it."

martyb writes:

GameStop shares rise, fall and rise again in roller-coaster day of trading:

GameStop shares spiked Wednesday, reaching $348 apiece, only to come crashing down to $172 each early in the afternoon, causing multiple halts in trading of the stock due to volatility. Stocks then moved back up and ended the day at $265[*], a 7% increase for the day.

The past two days were a buying frenzy for the video game retailer's stock since Monday, when it was $136. That surge coincided with a lift to the entire stock market after Saturday's passage of the COVID relief bill in the Senate, as well as with an announcement that the video game retailer is developing a new e-commerce strategy, with Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen heading that effort.

Cohen, who made a large investment in GameStop last year, will lead a committee seeking to transform GameStop a "technology business," the company said in a press release Monday.

GameStop shares skyrocketed from less than $20 in early January to more than $480 at the end of January thanks to a massive push by traders on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets. The stock price has dropped dramatically since then.

Price quote on Yahoo!

Also at BBC

Previously:
The Complete Moron's Guide to GameStop's Stock Roller Coaster
Console Options Without Disc Drives Could be GameStop's Final Death Knell
Web Site thinkgeek.com Moving in with Parent Company GameStop
GameStop Heading Towards Possible Doom
GameStop Posts Massive Loss as Pre-Owned Game Sales Plummet
GameStop's Future in Question after Failing to Secure Buyout

Original Submission

Booga1 writes:

GammaWire is reporting: Netflix to Start Testing Warnings for People Borrowing Login Info

It's still a small sample size but we have confirmed from a number of Netflix users that the streaming service is starting to roll out a test of warnings to those allegedly borrowing account login information from users outside of their home or family.

For the time being, the number of users impacted seems to be relatively small (there is some loose chatter about specific users receiving these warnings on Twitter and other social networks, but nothing widespread yet).

The warning pops up and requests that users verify that it is in fact their account with a verification code. In other words, if you're borrowing your ex's account, good luck with that text asking for them to forward you the code.

[...] The most notable part of this whole test is that Netflix has long claimed letting people borrow passwords has been one of their strongest marketing channels. While never officially confirmed, there were reports that Netflix had metrics showing those who used other people's Netflix accounts were highly likely to sign up for their own accounts. This recent push to drive people borrowing passwords into signing up for their own accounts might indicate an internal shift in Netflix's customer acquisition data showing a worrying trend for the company.

Do you think users would bother setting up personal VPNs to masquerade as members of the same household?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

[Nearly 4 years ago, we covered flooding at the "doomsday" seed bank at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Fortunately, there was no harm to the seed samples stored there. For further background, consult the Wikipedia entry on the seed vault. --Ed]

Why We Need A ‘Moon Ark’ To Store Frozen Seeds, Sperm And Eggs From 6.7 Million Earth Species:

Species or planets[sic] could be wiped off the face of the Earth any minute—so we need a “Moon Ark” to safely store frozen eggs, sperm, seeds and other DNA matter from all 6.7 million Earth species.

That’s according to students and staff at the University of Arizona, who at the IEEE Aerospace Conference last weekend divulged details of an ambitious “modern global insurance policy” for our planet.

Their daring plan is to build a complex in the Moon’s lava tubes staffed by robots and fuelled by solar panels on the lunar surface.

[...] The incredible plan to build a lunar base that includes an underground ark goes something like this:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Global heating pushes tropical regions towards limits of human livability:

Humans’ ability to regulate their body heat is dependent upon the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air. We have a core body temperature that stays relatively stable at 37C (98.6F), while our skin is cooler to allow heat to flow away from the inner body. But should the wet-bulb temperature – a measure of air temperature and humidity – pass 35C, high skin temperature means the body is unable to cool itself, with potentially deadly consequences.

“If it is too humid our bodies can’t cool off by evaporating sweat – this is why humidity is important when we consider livability in a hot place,” said Yi Zhang, a Princeton University researcher who led the new study, published in Nature Geoscience. “High body core temperatures are dangerous or even lethal.”

The research team looked at various historical data and simulations to determine how wet-bulb temperature extremes will change as the planet continues to heat up, discovering that these extremes in the tropics increase at around the same rate as the tropical mean temperature.

[...] Dangerous conditions in the tropics will unfold even before the 1.5C threshold, however, with the paper warning that 1C of extreme wet-bulb temperature increase “could have adverse health impact equivalent to that of several degrees of temperature increase”. The world has already warmed by around 1.1C on average due to human activity and although governments vowed in the Paris climate agreement to hold temperatures to 1.5C, scientists have warned this limit could be breached within a decade.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Tossing vaccine priority list, Biden tells states to open eligibility by May 1:

On the first anniversary of the global COVID-19 pandemic, US President Joe Biden announced that he will direct states to open vaccine eligibility to all American adults no later than May 1, a dramatic acceleration of the national immunization plan that has been sluggish and, at times, chaotic.

"That's much earlier than expected," Biden said in a televised, prime-time address. It doesn't mean every American over age 18 will have their shot by then, Biden cautioned, but you'll be able to get in line.

The announcement means that carefully crafted prioritizations for vaccines will soon no longer apply. The White House COVID-19 Response Team landed on May 1 for the deadline after concluding that national vaccination efforts would be far-enough along by the end of April to make the prioritizations obsolete anyway.

"If we all do our part, this country will be vaccinated soon," Biden said, "our economy will be on the mend, our kids will be back in school, and we'll have proven once again that this country can do anything."

Also at: CNN and c|net.

Original Submission