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DannyB writes:

Fun While It Lasted, Falcon 9 Telemetry Now Encrypted

A few weeks back we brought word that Reddit users [derekcz] and [Xerbot] had managed to receive the 2232.5 MHz telemetry downlink from a Falcon 9 upper stage and pull out some interesting plain-text strings. With further software fiddling, the vehicle's video streams were decoded, resulting in some absolutely breathtaking shots of the rocket and its payload from low Earth orbit.

Unfortunately, it looks like those heady days are now over, as [derekcz] reports the downlink from the latest Falcon 9 mission was nothing but intelligible noise.

[...] we know that SpaceX is actively pursuing more lucrative national security launch contracts for both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. For these sensitive government payloads, the normal on-screen telemetry data and space views are omitted from the company's official live streams. It seems likely the Pentagon would be very interested in finding out how civilians were able to obtain this information, and a guarantee from SpaceX that the link would be encrypted for all future flights could have helped smooth things over.

Isn't the government trying to require encryption to have back doors?

Also At:
ExtremeTech and RedOrbit, among others.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/windows-and-linux-devices-are-under-attack-by-a-new-cryptomining-worm/

A newly discovered cryptomining worm is stepping up its targeting of Windows and Linux devices with a batch of new exploits and capabilities, a researcher said.

Research company Juniper started monitoring what it's calling the Sysrv botnet in December. One of the botnet's malware components was a worm that spread from one vulnerable device to another without requiring any user action. It did this by scanning the Internet for vulnerable devices and, when found, infecting them using a list of exploits that has increased over time.

The malware also included a cryptominer that uses infected devices to create the Monero digital currency. There was a separate binary file for each component.
[...]
"Based on the binaries we have seen and the time when we have seen them, we found that the threat actor is constantly updating its exploit arsenal," Juniper researcher Paul Kimayong said in a Thursday blog post.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/the-amazon-union-drive-in-alabama-appears-headed-for-defeat/

Update: A majority of workers have voted not to form a union at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Bessemer, Alabama. The result of the NLRB's initial vote count was 1,798 votes against the union and 738 in favor. Hundreds of additional ballots were not counted because their authenticity was disputed. But the "no" side already has a majority of the 3,215 votes cast, making the issue moot.

Original story, April 8: A closely watched effort to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama appears to be headed for defeat. With about half the votes counted, 1,100 workers have voted against forming a union, while only 463 voted in favor.

The National Labor Relations Board is counting the 3,215 votes that were cast by workers at the Bessemer facility. The union needs to win at least half the votes in order to become the official representative of the roughly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer facility. Counting has ended for the evening and is scheduled to resume at 8:30 am Central Time on Friday.

Also at The Washington Post, c|net, and Al Jazeera.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Japanese doctors perform world's first living donor lung transplant to a Covid-19 patient:

[...] Kyoto University Hospital said the woman underwent an 11-hour operation by a 30-strong medical team on Wednesday to transplant lung tissue from her husband and son.

Covid-19 is known to cause severe lung damage in some patients, and people around the world -- including the United States -- have received lung transplants as part of their recovery from the disease.

But the Kyoto hospital said this case was the first in which lung tissue had been transplanted from living donors to a Covid-19 patient.

Dr. Hiroshi Date, a thoracic surgeon at the hospital who led the operation, said it gave hope to patients suffering from severe lung damage from Covid-19.

Original Submission

Rice, Intel Optimize AI Training for Commodity Hardware

hendrikboom writes:

Researchers claim they can get do deep learning faster and cheaper on a commodity CPU than with a GPU.

The press release actually contains links to the original papers!

“The whole industry is fixated on one kind of improvement — faster matrix multiplications,” Shrivastava said. “Everyone is looking at specialized hardware and architectures to push matrix multiplication. People are now even talking about having specialized hardware-software stacks for specific kinds of deep learning. Instead of taking an expensive algorithm and throwing the whole world of system optimization at it, I’m saying, ‘Let’s revisit the algorithm.'”

Shrivastava’s lab did that in 2019, recasting DNN training as a search problem that could be solved with hash tables. Their “sub-linear deep learning engine” (SLIDE) is specifically designed to run on commodity CPUs, and Shrivastava and collaborators from Intel showed it could outperform GPU-based training when they unveiled it at MLSys 2020.

Can we hope that this will release the GPU inventories for actual gamers?

SLIDE Algorithm for Training Deep Neural Nets Faster on CPUs than GPUs

NPC-131072 writes:

From SLIDE algorithm for training deep neural nets faster on CPUs than GPUs:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Water being pumped into Tampa Bay could cause a massive algae bloom:

Millions of gallons of water laced with fertilizer ingredients are being pumped into Florida's Tampa Bay from a leaking reservoir at an abandoned phosphate plant at Piney Point. As the water spreads into the bay, it carries phosphorus and nitrogen—nutrients that under the right conditions can fuel dangerous algae blooms that can suffocate sea grass beds and kill fish, dolphins and manatees.

It's the kind of risk no one wants to see, but officials believed the other options were worse.

About 300 homes sit downstream from the 480-million-gallon reservoir, which began leaking in late March 2021. State officials determined that pumping out the water was the only way to prevent the reservoir's walls from collapsing. They decided the safest location for all that water would be out through Port Manatee and into the bay.

Journal References:
1.) Jeff C. Ho, Anna M. Michalak, Nima Pahlevan. Widespread global increase in intense lake phytoplankton blooms since the 1980s, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1648-7)
2.) James W. Fourqurean, Carlos M. Duarte, Hilary Kennedy, et al. Seagrass ecosystems as a globally significant carbon stock, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1477)
3.) Janine Lemaire, Bénédicte Sisto, Hamilton Disston, et al. The Everglades Ecosystem: Under Protection or Under Threat?, Miranda. Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-speaking world (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.2881)
4.) Brian E. Lapointe, Rachel A. Brewton, Laura W. Herren, et al. Nitrogen enrichment, altered stoichiometry, and coral reef decline at Looe Key, Florida Keys, USA: a 3-decade study, Marine Biology (DOI: 10.1007/s00227-019-3538-9)

Original Submission

Eratosthenes writes:

Testing Our Fundamental Understanding of the Universe: Muon G-2 Experiment Hints at Mysterious New Physics :

What do touch screens, radiation therapy and shrink wrap have in common? They were all made possible by particle physics research. Discoveries of how the universe works at the smallest scale often lead to huge advances in technology we use every day.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, along with collaborators from 46 other institutions and seven countries, are conducting an experiment to put our current understanding of the universe to the test. The first result points to the existence of undiscovered particles or forces. This new physics could help explain long-standing scientific mysteries, and the new insight adds to a storehouse of information that scientists can tap into when modeling our universe and developing new technologies.

The experiment, Muon g-2 (pronounced Muon g minus 2), follows one that began in the ​‘90s at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in which scientists measured a magnetic property of a fundamental particle called the muon.

The Brookhaven experiment yielded a result that differed from the value predicted by the Standard Model, scientists’ best description of the makeup and behavior of the universe yet. The new experiment is a recreation of Brookhaven’s, built to challenge or affirm the discrepancy with higher precision.

The Standard Model very precisely predicts the muon’s g-factor — a value that tells scientists how this particle behaves in a magnetic field. This g-factor is known to be close to the value two, and the experiments measure their deviation from two, hence the name Muon g-2.

[Update: This story appears to be a dupe of Latest Muon Measurements Hint at Cracks in the Standard Model; as there are already comments here, it will remain posted for discussion. --martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Google Now Supports Rust For Android Os Development - 9To5Google:

For the past few years, Google has been encouraging developers to write Android apps with Kotlin. The underlying OS still uses C and C++, though Google today announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust.

This is part of Google’s work to address memory safety bugs in the operating system:

We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities.

[...] Rust “provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid.” Google has been working to add this support to AOSP for the past 18 months.

Performance is equivalent to the existing languages, while increasing the effectiveness of current sandboxing and reducing the overall need for it. [...] Other improvements include data concurrency, a more expressive type system, and safer integer handling.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple to Pay $3.4 Million USD to Settle Planned Obsolescence Lawsuit

Apple has agreed to settle and pay $3.4 million to Chilean users due to a class-action lawsuit filed by iPhone users who noticed that their older devices, which include the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone SE were performing significantly worse after an iOS update in 2017. Every registered Chilean user stands to gain $50, which has to be shared if there is more than one claim per device serial number. For instance, a second-hand phone may have two people filing a lawsuit for the same phone.

Around 150,000 Chilean iPhone users sued Apple for implementing a performance throttling feature in their 2017 iOS update. In the same year, Apple released the iOS 10.2.1 update and programmed in a feature that would forcefully slow down system performance in old iPhones by reducing the CPU's clock speed. This was done to prevent the phone from spontaneously shutting off due to poor battery health in degrading iPhones, but they failed to inform the user that this change would have a detrimental effect on their iPhone's performance.

Previously: Apple iPhones Appear to Slow Down as Battery Condition Degrades: Planned Obsolescence?
Two Class Action Lawsuits Filed After Apple Admits Slowing Down iPhones
Eight Lawsuits Filed Against Apple Over iPhone Slowdowns
Apple Offers $29 Battery Replacements in Response to iPhone Slowdown Scandal

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Decentralized DNS Project Handshake Patches Inflation Bug - CoinDesk:

The team behind the decentralized Domain Name Server (DNS) project, Handshake, recently patched a bug which could have inflated the supply of HNS coins.

When it existed in Handshake's code, the bug was never exploited and no user funds or domain data were compromised, Handshake's developers write in a post.

"A flaw was discovered in the Handshake protocol that could unintentionally increase the total HNS coin supply beyond its designed limits," the post reads. "A user with a reserved name claim could have accidentally generated small amounts of extra HNS by modifying their wallet. In the worst-case scenario, a malicious miner could generate nearly unlimited extra HNS in every block. The bug was never exploited and is now fixed."

The team advises miners and node operators to update to the newest version asap.

Handshake is "An experimental peer-to-peer root naming system." The "About Handshake" section of their web page says that "Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems. "

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

AMD Zen 3 CPUs vulnerable to Spectre-like attacks via PSF feature

US chipmaker AMD advised customers last week to disable a new performance feature if they plan to use CPUs for sensitive operations, as this feature is vulnerable to Spectre-like side-channel attacks.

Called Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF), this feature was added to AMD CPUs part of the company's Zen 3 core architecture, a processor series dedicated to gaming and high-performance computing, which launched in November 2020. (full article)

The feature implements a technique called speculative execution, which works by running multiple alternative CPU operations in advance to make results available faster, and then discarding "predicted" data once deemed unneeded.

Whitepaper: SECURITY ANALYSIS OF AMD PREDICTIVE STORE FORWARDING[.pdf]

[N.B. - The last statement in the whitepaper says "AMD recommends leaving the Predictive Store Forwarding feature enabled as the default setting." - Fnord]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

The Facebook Phone Numbers Are Now Searchable in Have I Been Pwned:

The headline is pretty self-explanatory so in the interest of time, let me just jump directly into the details of how this all works. There's been huge interest in this incident, and I've seen near-unprecedented traffic to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over the last couple of days, let me do my best to explain how I've approached the phone number search feature. Or if you're impatient, you can head over to HIBP right now and search for your number.

[...] I'd never planned to make phone numbers searchable and indeed this User Voice idea sat there for over 5 and a half years without action.

[...] The Facebook data changed all that. There's over 500M phone numbers but only a few million email addresses so 99% of people were getting a "miss" when they should have gotten a "hit". The phone numbers were easy to parse out from (mostly) well-formatted files. They were also all normalised into a nice consistent format with a country code. In short, this data set completely turned all my reasons for not doing this on its head.

[...] Another reason for pushing this feature out now is the sudden emergence of HIBP clones. I use this term endearingly; it's flattering to see my project influence others 🙂 But I also have absolutely no idea how trustworthy any of the multiple variations I've seen pop up already are. So, to avoid any shadow of doubt, I wanted to make sure that if you'd like to know if you've been pwned in the Facebook data, you can ask HIBP regardless of whether it's an email address or a phone number you're interested in.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

US and Canada gear up for another Asian 'murder hornet' season:

The Asian giant hornet – officially called Vespa mandarinia, the species is native to East Asia – first prompted concern in the US and Canada in 2019, when the first specimens were reported in both countries.

[...] The Asian giant hornet typically measures an inch-and-a-half in length and it is distinguished by a large head that is a mix of yellow and orange. US authorities said its sting is much more dangerous than that of bees or wasps and can cause "severe pain, swelling, necrosis and, in rare cases, even death" in some humans.

They can pose a risk to livestock and other insects, as well as honeybees, which are already facing dwindling numbers and for which the hornets "have a voracious appetite", according to Washington state authorities. "A small group of Asian giant hornets can kill an entire honeybee hive in a matter of hours," the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) said.

That is why experts have said it is important for the invasive species, which is not native to North America, to be eradicated.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

SpaceX landed a rocket on a boat five years ago:

Five years ago today, SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket first stage on a boat.

[...] After nearly a dozen failed attempts, subsequent landings soon filled a SpaceX hangar full of used rockets. This caught some SpaceX engineers off guard. "It even surprised us that we suddenly had ten first stages or something like that," Hans Koenigsmann, one of SpaceX's earliest hires, said a few years afterward. "And we were like, well, we didn't really account for that."

[...] Yet the economics pretty much require landing downrange of a launch site. That's because over the course of a launch, a rocket gradually leans from a vertical to horizontal orientation as it prepares to release its second stage on an orbital trajectory. At this point it requires tons of propellant to arrest this horizontal velocity and reverse course back to the launch site. It is much more fuel-efficient to have the rocket follow a parabolic arc and land hundreds of kilometers from the launch site.

This is borne out in the performance data. A Falcon 9 rocket that lands on a drone ship can lift about 5.5 tons to geostationary transfer orbit, compared to 3.5 tons for a rocket that lands back at the launch site. Had SpaceX not figured out how to land the Falcon 9 first stage on a drone ship, it would have eliminated about 40 percent of the rocket's lift capability, a huge penalty that would have negated the benefit of reusing rockets.

[...] In the 2000s, SpaceX very nearly died on multiple occasions as a fledgling company with its Falcon 1 rocket. In the 2010s, SpaceX iterated on the Falcon 9, first winning contracts for NASA launches and commercial satellites. These missions, in turn, gave SpaceX engineers the breathing room to experiment with recovering and refurbishing used rockets. Today, thanks to this, they're able to fly first stages rapidly and at significantly reduced costs.

MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for TheMightyBuzzard

More than half of people with strong Covid infection are asymptomatic, new figures show:

More than half of people with a strong Covid infection did not report any of the major symptoms, new figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.

This underlines the risk of people spreading the virus without knowing they are infected which is thought to be one of the main ways the coronavirus pandemic has been able to spread so easily around the world.

The ONS said 53 per cent of people with a strong positive, or high viral load, between December and March did not report having any symptoms compared to 47 per cent who did. It excluded patients likely to be at the start of their infection when transmission and symptoms are thought to be less likely.

Fatigue, headache and cough were the most commonly reported symptoms amongst people who had a strong positive test for Covid-19.

[...] "Around half of those we tested did not report any symptoms even whilst having high levels of the virus present in their body. This underlines that people in the community may unknowingly have the virus and potentially transmit it to others."

Original Submission