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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:44 | Votes:96

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @10:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-sure-whether-to-feel-happy-or-sad-about-this dept.

Blood Test Developed to Detect Depression and Bipolar Disorder:

While current diagnosis and treatment approaches are largely trial and error, a breakthrough study by Indiana University School of Medicine researchers sheds new light on the biological basis of mood disorders, and offers a promising blood test aimed at a precision medicine approach to treatment.

Led by Alexander B. Niculescu, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at IU School of Medicine, the study was published today (April 8, 2021) in the high impact journal Molecular Psychiatry. The work builds on previous research conducted by Niculescu and his colleagues into blood biomarkers that track suicidality as well as pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and Alzheimer's disease.

"We have pioneered the area of precision medicine in psychiatry over the last two decades, particularly over the last 10 years. This study represents a current state-of-the-art outcome of our efforts," said Niculescu. "This is part of our effort to bring psychiatry from the 19th century into the 21st century. To help it become like other contemporary fields such as oncology. Ultimately, the mission is to save and improve lives."

The team's work describes the development of a blood test, composed of RNA biomarkers, that can distinguish how severe a patient's depression is, the risk of them developing severe depression in the future, and the risk of future bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness). The test also informs tailored medication choices for patients.

[...] In addition to the diagnostic and therapeutic advances discovered in their latest study, Niculescu's team found that mood disorders are underlined by circadian clock genes — the genes that regulate seasonal, day-night and sleep-wake cycles.

"That explains why some patients get worse with seasonal changes, and the sleep alterations that occur in mood disorders," said Niculescu.

Journal Reference:
H. Le-Niculescu, K. Roseberry, S. S. Gill, et al. Precision medicine for mood disorders: objective assessment, risk prediction, pharmacogenomics, and repurposed drugs [open], Molecular Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1038/s41380-021-01061-w)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @08:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the ADD-compiler-TO-Linux-GIVING-more-buy-in. dept.

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86:

IBM has announced a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86.

News of the offering appeared in an announcement that states: "IBM COBOL for Linux on x86 1.1 brings IBM's COBOL compilation technologies and capabilities to the Linux on x86 environment," and describes it as "the latest addition to the IBM COBOL compiler family, which includes Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and COBOL for AIX."

[...] COBOL shops have been promised that "minimal customization effort and delivery time are required for strategically deploying COBOL/CICS applications developed for z/OS to Linux on x86 and cloud environments."

The new offering does that by linking to DB2 and IBM's Customer Information Control System so that apps on Linux using x86 can chat with older COBOL apps. Big Blue has also baked in native XML support to further help interoperability, and created a conversion utility that can migrate COBOL source code developed with non-IBM COBOL compilers.

[...] The new offering requires RHEL 7.8 or later, or Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, or later. ®


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the Bennu-we-knew-thee-well dept.

NASA reports, via NASA, that OSIRIS-REx is leaving Bennu.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx completed its last flyover of Bennu around 6 a.m. EDT (4 a.m. MDT) April 7 and is now slowly drifting away from the asteroid; however, the mission team will have to wait a few more days to find out how the spacecraft changed the surface of Bennu when it grabbed a sample of the asteroid.

The OSIRIS-REx team added this flyby to document surface changes resulting from the Touch and Go (TAG) sample collection maneuver Oct. 20, 2020. "By surveying the distribution of the excavated material around the TAG site, we will learn more about the nature of the surface and subsurface materials along with the mechanical properties of the asteroid," said Dr. Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona.

During the flyby, OSIRIS-REx imaged Bennu for 5.9 hours, covering more than a full rotation of the asteroid. It flew within 2.1 miles' (3.5 kilometers) distance to the surface of Bennu – the closest it's been since the TAG sample collection event.

Just to mention, the survey and selection of a sampling site was one of the recent "citizen science" projects.

It will take until at least April 13 for OSIRIS-REx to downlink all of the data and new pictures of Bennu's surface recorded during the flyby. It shares the Deep Space Network antennas with other missions like Mars Perseverance, and typically gets 4–6 hours of downlink time per day. "We collected about 4,000 megabytes of data during the flyby," said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager of OSIRIS-REx at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Bennu is approximately 185 million miles from Earth right now, which means we can only achieve a downlink data-rate of 412 kilobits per second, so it will take several days to download all of the flyby data."

Once the mission team receives the images and other instrument data, they will study how OSIRIS-REx jumbled up Bennu's surface. During touchdown, the spacecraft's sampling head sunk 1.6 feet (48.8 centimeters) into the asteroid's surface and simultaneously fired a pressurized charge of nitrogen gas. The spacecraft's thrusters kicked up a large amount of surface material during the back-away burn – launching rocks and dust in the process.

OSIRIS-REx, with its pristine and precious asteroid cargo, will remain in the vicinity of Bennu until May 10 when it will fire its thrusters and begin its two-year cruise home. The mission will deliver the asteroid sample to Earth Sept. 24, 2023.

There should be road music for this? Like Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound"?

Previously:
Asteroid Bennu May be Hollow According to a New Study
NASA Releases Incredible Video of OSIRIS-REx Tagging Asteroid – Mysterious Dark Patches Puzzle Team
Asteroid Samples Successfully Sealed in Capsule to Return to Earth, NASA Says
OSIRIS-REx Overflows with Asteroid Samples after Bagging Bounty from Bennu
First NASA Osiris-Rex Images Show Incredible Touchdown on Asteroid Bennu
NASA's OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Successfully Touches Asteroid
Touch-and-Go: US Spacecraft Sampling Asteroid for Return
NASA's Asteroid Mission Completes Final Test Before Sampling Run
NASA's OSIRIS-REx Ready for Touchdown on Asteroid Bennu
OSIRIS-REx Enters Into Orbit Around Asteroid Bennu
NASA Finds Evidence of Water on Asteroid Bennu
NASA's OSIRIS-REx "Arrives" at Asteroid Bennu
OSIRIS-REx Approaches Bennu, Sends Photo Captured at a Distance of 330 km
New Horizons Spacecraft Approaches 2014 MU69; OSIRIS-REx Nears 101955 Bennu
OSIRIS-REx Images Earth During Gravity Assist Flyby
OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission - Launch Successful
NASA's Mission to (Potentially Devastating) Asteroid Bennu


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the long-long-road-to-not-quite-recovered dept.

Study shows a third of COVID survivors suffer neurological or mental disorders :

One in three COVID-19 survivors in a study of more than 230,000 mostly American patients were diagnosed with a brain or psychiatric disorder within six months, suggesting the pandemic could lead to a wave of mental and neurological problems, scientists said.

Researchers who conducted the analysis said it was not clear how the virus was linked to psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression, but that these were the most common diagnoses among the 14 disorders they looked at.

[...] The new findings, published in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, analysed health records of 236,379 COVID-19 patients, mostly from the United States, and found 34 per cent had been diagnosed with neurological or psychiatric illnesses within six months.

The Lancet article includes this disclaimer:

Big-data studies of this kind have intrinsic limitations, even when drawing on 81 million people, 236 379 of whom had COVID-19. In this pandemic context, not all individuals who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 (particularly those with mild or asymptomatic illness) will be diagnosed, which could result in some contamination of the comparison groups.

The question: will severe, enduring, and less common conditions such as psychoses behave more like neurological disorders or common mental disorders? Among the COVID-19 cohort in this study, a first diagnosis of a psychotic disorder was substantially more common in patients hospitalised with COVID-19.

Lungs, hearts and brains..

Journal Reference:
Jonathan P Rogers. A longer look at COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric outcomes, The Lancet Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00120-6)

Previously:
Experts Warn Coronavirus May Cause 'Wave' of Neurological Conditions Including Parkinson's Disease
2020-06-15 Roundup of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2, Coronavirus) Stories


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the Smokey-Eyed-Windows-of-Dark-Energy dept.

Source: Dark Energy Survey physicists open new window into dark energy:

The universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and while no one is sure why, researchers with the Dark Energy Survey (DES) at least had a strategy for figuring it out: They would combine measurements of the distribution of matter, galaxies and galaxy clusters to better understand what's going on.

Reaching that goal turned out to be pretty tricky, but now a team led by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the University of Arizona have come up with a solution. Their analysis, published April 6 in Physical Review Letters, yields more precise estimates of the average density of matter as well as its propensity to clump together—two key parameters that help physicists probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious substances that make up the vast majority of the universe.

"It is one of the best constraints from one of the best data sets to date," says Chun-Hao To, a lead author on the new paper and a graduate student at SLAC and Stanford working with Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology Director Risa Wechsler.

Serendipity?

When DES set out in 2013 to map an eighth of the sky, the goal was to gather four kinds of data: the distances to certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars; the distribution of matter in the universe; the distribution of galaxies; and the distribution of galaxy clusters. Each tells researchers something about how the universe has evolved over time.

[...] To avoid mishandling all this information, University of Arizona astrophysicist Elisabeth Krause and colleagues have developed a new model that could properly account for the connections in the distributions of all three quantities: matter, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. In doing so, they were able to produce the first-ever analysis to properly combine all these disparate data sets in order to learn about dark matter and dark energy.

Certain Soylentils are going to be very put out!

Journal Reference:
Chun-Hao To, et al (DES Collaboration). Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Cluster Abundances, Weak Lensing, and Galaxy Correlations, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141301)

Previously:
Could Something Missing in the Universe be Revealed by Ripples in Spacetime?
Astronomers Identified a Piece of the Milky Way's Missing Matter
Warp Drive News. Seriously!


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @10:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the eye-see-what-you-did-there dept.

Eye tracking can reveal an unbelievable amount of information about you:

Eye tracking technology is starting to pop up more and more, keeping track of where you're looking and how your pupils and irises are reacting for a variety of different purposes. It doesn't require particularly complex technology; a HD video camera that can watch your face is enough to collect the data.

But according to a 2020 research review, this data can divulge an extraordinary amount of information about you when it's crunched through advanced data analysis systems. "Our analysis of the literature," reads the paper's abstract, "shows that eye tracking data may implicitly contain information about a user's biometric identity, gender, age, ethnicity, body weight, personality traits, drug consumption habits, emotional state, skills and abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences."

That's not all; "Certain eye tracking measures," says the review, "may even reveal specific cognitive processes and can be used to diagnose various physical and mental health conditions." According to Grandview Research, "the analyzed data is used to study a myriad of psychiatric and neurological conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Schizophrenia, among others."

[...] They can also track the length of fixations, rapid eye motions between fixations, smooth pursuit movements and things like the acceleration and maximum speed of your eye movements.

They can analyze your eyelids, watching how far open your eyes are, how often you're blinking and how long your eyes are staying shut when you do. They can take note of redness and see how watery or dry your eyes are through reflections. They can measure the dilation of your pupils – famously an indication of sexual interest or arousal, but also linked to drug use, fear and certain types of brain damage. They can note your eye color and iris texture.

[...] Biometric identity can be established using a combination of things. The colors and patterns in your irises, for starters, can be used almost like a fingerprint. But so can your pupil reactivity, your gaze velocity and the trajectories your eyes take when following a moving object; mechanical and brain function differences make these things unique to you.

Then there's mental workload – an area in which eye tracking sometimes performs better than an EEG. Pupil dilation can be used as a measure of task difficulty and mental effort. Your blink rate correlates with dopamine levels, signifying learning and goal-directed behavior.

[... The full study – What Does Your Gaze Reveal About You? On the Privacy Implications of Eye Tracking – is available for free at Springer Link.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can-call-me-[cosmic]-Ray dept.

Cosmic rays causing 30,000 network malfunctions in Japan each year:

Cosmic rays are causing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 malfunctions in domestic network communication devices in Japan every year, a Japanese telecom giant found recently.

Most so-called "soft errors," or temporary malfunctions, in the network hardware of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. are automatically corrected via safety devices, but experts said in some cases they may have led to disruptions.

It is the first time the actual scale of soft errors in domestic information infrastructures has become evident.

Soft errors occur when the data in an electronic device is corrupted after neutrons, produced when cosmic rays hit oxygen and nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere, collide with the semiconductors within the equipment.

[...] Although NTT did not reveal if network communication disruptions have actually occurred, the company said it was "implementing measures against major issues" and "confirming the quality of the safety devices and equipment design through experiments and presumptions."


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the mysterious-muon-magnetic-moment dept.

Ars Technica

The Muon g-2 experiment (pronounced "gee minus two") is designed to look for tantalizing hints of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. It does this by measuring the magnetic field (aka the magnetic moment) generated by a subatomic particle known as the muon. Back in 2001, an earlier run of the experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a slight discrepancy, hinting at possible new physics, but that controversial result fell short of the critical threshold required to claim discovery.

Now, Fermilab physicists have completed their initial analysis of data from the updated Muon g-2 experiment, showing "excellent agreement" with the discrepancy Brookhaven recorded. The results were announced today in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Journal References:
1.) B. Abi, et al. Measurement of the Positive Muon Anomalous Magnetic Moment to 0.46 ppm [open], Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141801)
2.) T. Albahri et al. (The Muon g−2 Collaboration) Magnetic-field measurement and analysis for the Muon g−2 Experiment at Fermilab [open], Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.103.042208)
3.) T. Albahri et al. (Muon g−2 Collaboration)Measurement of the anomalous precession frequency of the muon in the Fermilab Muon g−2 Experiment [open], Physical Review D (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.103.072002)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fast-AND-cheap? dept.

SpaceX does not plan to add 'tiered pricing' for Starlink satellite internet service, president says

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell does not think the company will add "tiered pricing" for its direct-to-consumer Starlink satellite internet service, which is currently offered at $99 a month in limited early access.

"I don't think we're going to do tiered pricing to consumers. We're going to try to keep it as simple as possible and transparent as possible, so right now there are no plans to tier for consumers," Shotwell said, speaking at the Satellite 2021 "LEO Digital Forum" on a virtual panel on Tuesday.

[...] In October, SpaceX began rolling out early Starlink service in a public beta that now extends to customers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and New Zealand – with service priced at $99 a month in the U.S., in addition to an upfront cost for the equipment needed to connect to the satellites.

[...] Musk's company plans to expand Starlink beyond homes, asking the Federal Communications Commission to widen its connectivity authorization to "moving vehicles," so the service could be used with everything from aircraft to ships to large trucks.

[...] Shotwell said SpaceX has "made great progress on reducing the cost" of the Starlink user terminal, which originally were about $3,000 each. She said the terminals now cost less than $1,500, and SpaceX "just rolled out a new version that saved about $200 off the cost."

See also: SpaceX's Starlink terminal production costs have dropped over 50%, reveals president
Satellite operators weigh strategies to compete against growing Starlink network


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the Cruising-COVID-19-Cauldrons dept.

Cruise industry salty over CDC plan to keep travelers safe from COVID at sea:

The cruise industry is rather salty about the latest federal guidance for safe pandemic sailing, calling it "burdensome" and "unworkable. "

The new guidance is an updated phase of the Framework for Conditional Sailing Order (CSO), released April 2 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While it does not mandate vaccinations for all staff and cruisegoers, it does recommend the shots and requires added layers of health measures to try giving any onboard COVID-19 outbreaks the heave-ho—which is exceedingly difficult to do on the tightly packed, highly social vessels.

Among several changes, the guidance requires cruise operators to increase how frequently they report the number of COVID-19 cases onboard, upping reporting from weekly to daily. It also requires cruise lines to implement new routine testing for crew members. Additionally, the guidance requires that cruise lines have agreements set up with port authorities and local health authorities to ensure that, in the event of an outbreak, there will be coordination and infrastructure necessary to safely quarantine, isolate, and treat passengers and crew on land.

Once those requirements are met, cruise operators can run mock cruises with volunteer passengers and, if all goes well, apply for a "Conditional Sailing Certificate."

In a statement released Monday, the prominent industry trade group Cruise Lines International Association released a statement calling the new guidance "unduly burdensome, largely unworkable."

The CLIA claims the health guidance "deprives US workers from participating in the economic recovery" and provides "no discernable path forward or timeframe for resumption" of cruises originating in the country. The group ended its statement by urging the Biden administration to "consider the ample evidence that supports lifting the CSO this month to allow for the planning of a controlled return to service this summer."


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday April 07 2021, @09:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the Now-that's-just-sick! dept.

Pandemic to cost NASA up to $3 billion

A NASA audit concluded that costs imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic on the agency could reach $3 billion, with several major science and exploration programs accounting for much of that cost.

A March 31 report by the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) stated that the agency expects that the pandemic's effects on the agency, ranging from closed facilities to disrupted supply chains, to be nearly $3 billion. Of that, about $1.6 billion came from 30 major programs and projects, defined by NASA as those with a total cost of at least $250 million.

[...] The project with the largest cost increase in the report is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). It reported $3 million in costs because of the pandemic in fiscal year 2020, but estimates nearly $400 million in additional impacts in future years. The mission has a lifecycle cost of $3.9 billion.

[...] The Space Launch System had the second-highest cost increase in terms of overall dollars, at $363 million, of which $8 million was in fiscal year 2020 and $355 million in fiscal years 2021 through 2023. A three-month delay in the first SLS mission, Artemis 1, along with "rephrasing production" each accounted for about one-third of the costs. The rest came from "surge costs" to compress schedules as well as the costs of facility shutdowns.

The Orion spacecraft suffered $146 million in costs, including $5 million in fiscal year 2020 and $66 million in fiscal year 2021. Because the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 1 mission was nearly complete at the time the pandemic hit, the largest effects were on the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 2 and 3 missions, both still in production. Those problems extended to Europe, with delays in the production of the European Service Module for the Artemis 2 Orion.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday April 07 2021, @07:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-languages-does-it-work-best-and-worst-on? dept.

Google Posts Initial Code For Lyra Speech Codec

Back in February we covered Google's work on the Lyra voice/audio codec designed for fitting with very low bit-rate audio for speech compression in use-cases like WebRTC and video chatting even on the most limited Internet connections. Thanks to leveraging machine learning, Lyra can function at just 3kbps. The code to Lyra is now public.

[...] The Lyra high-quality, low-bitrate speech codec is open-source with an initial v0.0.1 beta commit made today. Building Lyra requires the Bazel build system as well as a particular revision of LLVM/Clang for ABI compatibility.

GitHub (Apache-2.0 License).

Also at VentureBeat and CNX Software.

Previously:
Google Unveils Lyra Audio Codec with Better Speech Compression than Opus


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday April 07 2021, @04:43PM   Printer-friendly

Colorado Denied Its Citizens the Right-to-Repair After Riveting Testimony:

Colorado’s proposed right-to-repair law was simple and clear. At 11 pages, the legislation spent most of its word count defining terms, but the gist was simple: It would let people fix their own stuff without needing to resort to the manufacturer and force said manufacturer to support people who want to fix stuff.

“For the purpose of providing services for digital electronic equipment sold or used in this state, an original equipment manufacturer shall, with fair and reasonable terms and cost, make available to an independent repair provider or owner of the manufacturer’s equipment any documentation, parts, embedded software, firmware, or tools that are intended for use with the digital electronic equipment, including updates to documentation, information, or embedded software,” the proposed bill said.

Right-to-repair is often spoken of in the context of broken phone screens, but it doesn’t just affect people’s personal devices. Agricultural and medical equipment are increasingly impossible to fix because manufacturers want to maintain a monopoly on repairing the product. These issues can make the right-to-repair literally life and death.

The Colorado House Business Affairs & Labor committee met to consider the law on March 25. Twelve legislators voted to indefinitely postpone considering the bill. Only one voted for it. “I still have a lot of questions. I still have a lot of concerns,” Rep. Monica Duran (D) said at the end of the committee hearing. She voted no on the bill.

[...] It was a stunning statement given just how many people testified on behalf of the right-to-repair legislation and how few questions the committee asked them.

Here's just the first of the many cases cited:

Kenny Maestas, who uses a wheelchair, drove this home in his testimony before the committee. Maestas spent a long time in the hospital and when he came home, his mobility was restricted. An electric wheelchair helped him get around, but it was broken. The right arm of the chair was broken and the battery would no longer hold a charge.

“Both my son and brothers were capable and ready to do whatever needed to get done...I called on the 14th of December,” he told the committee. “I was told the next time a tech would be in my area would be the 18th of January. As a rural resident of Colorado I’m used to a regional delay, but 35 days seemed excessive.”

Maestas said that the electric wheelchair company had the battery and spare parts on file to fix his chair, but the company’s procedure required a technician to first inspect the chair before making a repair. It was another 28 days after the tech first arrived before Maestas was mobile again. It was more than 60 days before his chair was working again.

“It’s never appropriate to make a human being with a critical care need wait over two months for a repair that could have been completed in two days,” he said. The committee asked Maestas no questions.

The story concludes:

[...] Bill sponsor Brianna Titone (D) told Motherboard she plans to keep fighting.

“I was particularly frustrated by a committee member who said they had ‘so many unanswered questions’ yet didn't ask any during the committee,” she said in an email.

[...] Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington are also considering right-to-repair laws. Colorado’s fight is a preview for what to expect as legislators prepare to consider those bills.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 07 2021, @02:16PM   Printer-friendly

Android sends 20x more data to Google than iOS sends to Apple, study says:

Whether you have an iPhone or an Android device, it's continuously sending data including your location, phone number, and local network details to Apple or Google. Now, a researcher has provided a side-by-side comparison that suggests that, while both iOS and Android collect handset data around the clock—even when devices are idle, just out of the box, or after users have opted out—the Google mobile OS collects about 20 times as much data than its Apple competitor.

Both iOS and Android, researcher Douglas Leith from Trinity College in Ireland said, transmit telemetry data to their motherships even when a user hasn't logged in or has explicitly configured privacy settings to opt out of such collection. Both OSes also send data to Apple and Google when a user does simple things such as inserting a SIM card or browsing the handset settings screen. Even when idle, each device connects to its back-end server on average every 4.5 minutes.

It wasn't just the OSes that sent data to Apple or Google. Preinstalled apps or services also made network connections, even when they hadn't been opened or used. Whereas iOS automatically sent Apple data from Siri, Safari, and iCloud, Android collected data from Chrome, YouTube, Google Docs, Safetyhub, Google Messenger, the device clock, and the Google search bar.

[...] Where Android stands out, Leith said, is in the amount of data it collects. At startup, an Android device sends Google about 1MB of data, compared with iOS sending Apple around 42KB. When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period. In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB.

Google has contested the findings, saying that they're based on faulty methods for measuring the data that's collected by each OS. The company also contended that data collection is a core function of any Internet-connected device.

[...] An Apple spokesperson also spoke on the condition it be background. The spokesperson said that Apple provides transparency and control for personal information it collects, that the report gets things wrong, that Apple offers privacy protections that prevent Apple from tracking user locations, and that Apple informs users about the collection of location-related data.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 07 2021, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly

Most loved programming language Rust sparks privacy concerns

Rust developers have repeatedly raised concerned about an unaddressed privacy issue over the last few years. [...] However, for the longest time developers have been bothered by their production builds leaking potentially sensitive debug information.

In early 2017, a Rust developer filed an issue on the Rust lang's GitHub asking, "How can I stop rustc [from] including system specific information such as absolute file paths of the source it's compiled from in the binaries it generates? [...] These absolute path names revealed the developer's system username and the overall structure of directories, including the home directory."

[...] On a first glance, this "leak" of usernames and absolute paths may seem trivial to a reader. However, over years, many more developers were left surprised to notice such information being included not just in debug builds but their production Rust builds as well [1, 2, 3, 4, ...] and pushed for a change.

[...] Interestingly, despite being a privacy risk, the inadvertent inclusion of metadata such as absolute paths may aid computer forensics experts and the law enforcement as the path could reveal system usernames. Of course, any developer who is aware of this issue can trivially build their Rust applications inside of a container, and use a pseudonymous username to minimize impact from the issue.

To understand if Rust considered this a vulnerability or planned on a bug fix, BleepingComputer reached out to the Rust core team for comment.

"We agree that this is a bug worth fixing and will be supporting our teams in solving it," Manish Goregaokar of the Rust team and a senior software engineer at Google told BleepingComputer.

Although at this time, it is not known how or when the Rust team plans on resolving this issue, the increased pressure from the developer community seems to be steering Rust maintainers into an actionable direction.


Original Submission