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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Supreme Court reins in definition of crime under controversial hacking law:

The Supreme Court issued a ruling Thursday that imposes a limit on what counts as a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The case involves a former Georgia police sergeant who "used his own, valid credentials" to get information about a license plate number from a law enforcement database, the court decision said. The sergeant ran the search in exchange for money and for non-law enforcement purposes, violating a department policy. He was charged with a felony under the CFAA, which says it's a crime when someone "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access." He was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison in May 2018.

A federal appeals court upheld the conviction, but the Supreme Court reversed it today in a 6-3 decision that said Van Buren did not violate the CFAA. Justices found that the cybersecurity statute does not make it a crime to obtain information from a computer when the person has authorized access to that machine, even if the person has "improper motives."

The court wrote:

DECbot writes:

Wyoming has selected billionaire Bill Gates's company TerraPower LLC and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway's owned power company PacifiCorp to build the nation's first Natrium reactor. As reported by Reuters:

TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), said the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels than traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.

"This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative," Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon said. "Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy" in Wyoming, the country's top coal-producing state.

The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system's power output to 500 MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1 billion.

[...] Chris Levesque, TerraPower's president and CEO, said the demonstration plant would take about seven years to build.

"We need this kind of clean energy on the grid in the 2030s," he told reporters.

Also seen over at ZeroHedge.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Girl, 9, and sister, 4, walk away from crash with truck after taking parents’ car to drive to beach – My Blog:

A nine-year-old girl who swiped her parents’ car keys and tried to drive to the beach in the middle of the night with her four-year-old sister has crashed head-on with a semi-truck.

The Utah youngsters wanted to have a road trip to California to swim with dolphins in the ocean and drove 10 miles from their West Jordan home before the collision.

[...] The young children who share a bedroom took the car keys at 3am and headed to the car where it took them an hour and a half to work out the basics of driving, police said.

They headed out from the driveway at 4.30am and drove around 10 miles before they sideswiped a vehicle on the on-ramp.

A semi-truck driver thought the driver was under the influence and the nine-year-old then swerved into his path after leaving State Road 201 on to 3200 West.

Both the car and the truck had to be towed and police said it could have been much worse if the girls were not wearing seatbelts.

How old were you the first time you tried to drive?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AMD is bringing performance-boosting SmartShift tech to Linux laptops:

AMD is seemingly continuing to prepare the ground for its SmartShift tech to debut on Linux laptops, and hopefully this should be realized in time for the launch of the next batch of all-AMD notebooks.

This is according to Linux enthusiast site Phoronix.com, which flagged up a couple of recent patches adding elements of support for SmartShift under Linux – which follows a bunch of previous work – and theoretically we could be looking at full support making the cut for the Linux 5.14 kernel later this year.

[...] Also noteworthy is that AMD once again touched on what SmartShift does at the recent Computex show, highlighting some of the frame rate boosts (in the order of 10% or so) which can be expected with this tech alongside Smart Access Memory.

SmartShift was first revealed for Windows 10 laptops early last year, and the tech allows for the shifting of power dynamically between the CPU and GPU, enabling a swift performance boost when the workload requires it. However, SmartShift only came to a single Dell laptop in 2020, with the broader rollout being delayed until 2021 – and indeed further SmartShift-toting notebooks were finally just shown off at Computex.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Scientists make powerful underwater glue inspired by barnacles and mussels:

If you have ever tried to chip a mussel off a seawall or a barnacle off the bottom of a boat, you will understand that we could learn a great deal from nature about how to make powerful adhesives. Engineers at Tufts University have taken note, and today report a new type of glue inspired by those stubbornly adherent crustaceans in the journal Advanced Science.

Starting with the fibrous silk protein harvested from silkworms, they were able to replicate key features of barnacle and mussel glue, including protein filaments, chemical crosslinking and iron bonding. The result is a powerful non-toxic glue that sets and works as well underwater as it does in dry conditions and is stronger than most synthetic glue products now on the market.

"The composite we created works not only better underwater than most adhesives available today, it achieves that strength with much smaller quantities of material," said Fiorenzo Omenetto, Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts School of Engineering, director of the Tufts Silklab where the material was created, and corresponding author of the study. "And because the material is made from extracted biological sources, and the chemistries are benign - drawn from nature and largely avoiding synthetic steps or the use of volatile solvents - it could have advantages in manufacturing as well."

Journal Reference:
Marco Lo Presti, Giorgio Rizzo, Gianluca M. Farinola, et al. Bioinspired Biomaterial Composite for All‐Water‐Based High‐Performance Adhesives [open], Advanced Science (DOI: 10.1002/advs.202004786)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Venus can't wait—NASA plans blockbuster return to hothouse neighbor:

Venus can no longer wait. NASA will send two new robotic missions to Earth's hothouse twin, the agency's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced this afternoon at his "state of NASA" speech here at the agency's headquarters. The announcement effectively creates a new Venus program in one fell swoop.

[...] The first mission selected from four finalists named in February 2020 is DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and led by James Garvin, chief scientist of Goddard's scientific division. It will send an armored sphere plunging through the venusian atmosphere, its instruments measuring noble gases to sort out the planet's origins and sniffing for sulfur and carbon near the surface for evidence of recent volcanic activity. DAVINCI+ will also include an orbiter to map the planet's geology, including its mysterious highlands.

[...] Analyzing isotopes of these noble gases in the atmosphere could give scientists a window into whether Venus started with as much water as Earth—and whether the planet might still be hiding water, the lubricant of plate tectonics, deep in its interior. Probing the rock composition could reveal whether, as some researchers suspect, the slightly elevated regions called tesserae are remnants of continents.

The second Venus mission is VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and led by Suzanne Smrekar, a planetary scientist at JPL. It will use synthetic aperture radar to peer through the planet's thick clouds and re-create its topography, revealing whether volcanoes or variants of tectonic plates are active on its surface.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

FBI: REvil cybergang behind the JBS ransomware attack:

The Federal Bureau of Investigations has officially stated that the REvil operation, aka Sodinokibi, is behind the ransomware attack targeting JBS, the world's largest meat producer.

"We have attributed the JBS attack to REvil and Sodinokibi and are working diligently to bring the threat actors to justice," says an FBI Statement on JBS Cyberattack.

[...] The REvil ransomware operation is believed to be operated by a core group of Russian threat actors who recruit affiliates, or partners, who breach corporate networks, steal their data, and encrypt their devices.

This operation is run as a ransomware-as-a-service, where the core team earns 20-30% of all ransom payments, while the rest goes to their affiliates.

REvil, also known as Sodinokibi, launched its operation in April 2019 and is believed to be an offshoot or rebranding of the notorious GandCrab ransomware gang, which closed shop in June 2019.

[...] The operation claims to have earned $100 million in a single year through ransom payments.

[...] The JBS ransomware attack occurred in the early morning hours of Sunday, May 31st, causing JBS to shut down its network to prevent the spread of the attack.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

New 'Swiss Army knife' cleans up water pollution:

Phosphate pollution in rivers, lakes and other waterways has reached dangerous levels, causing algae blooms that starve fish and aquatic plants of oxygen. Meanwhile, farmers worldwide are coming to terms with a dwindling reserve of phosphate fertilizers that feed half the world's food supply.

Inspired by Chicago's many nearby bodies of water, a Northwestern University-led team has developed a way to repeatedly remove and reuse phosphate from polluted waters. The researchers liken the development to a "Swiss Army knife" for pollution remediation as they tailor their membrane to absorb and later release other pollutants.

[...] Phosphorus underpins both the world's food system and all life on earth. Every living organism on the planet requires it: phosphorous is in cell membranes, the scaffolding of DNA and in our skeleton. Though other key elements like oxygen and nitrogen can be found in the atmosphere, phosphorous has no analog. The small fraction of usable phosphorous comes from the Earth's crust, which takes thousands or even millions of years to weather away. And our mines are running out.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

New 'superfood' for bees may be able to help detoxify hives contaminated with pesticides:

TORONTO -- To bee or not to bee? Researchers have synthesized a particle as small as pollen, which, when fed to bees, may be able to help them to detoxify hives damaged by pesticides in order to protect the insects.

"This is a low-cost, scalable solution which we hope will be a first step to address the insecticide toxicity issue and contribute to the protection of managed pollinators," Minglin Ma, an associate professor at Cornell University and senior author of the research, said in a press release.

[...] The wax and pollen in around 98 per cent of commercial bee hives in the U.S. have been contaminated by various pesticides, according to the release, and pesticides cause beekeepers to lose around a third of their hives annually.

[...] "We have a solution whereby beekeepers can feed their bees our microparticle products in pollen patties or in a sugar syrup, and it allows them to detoxify the hive of any pesticides that they might find," James Webb said in the release. Webb is a co-author of the paper and CEO of Beemmunity, a new company hoping to use this technology to assist commercial beekeepers.

The new microparticles are formulated to battle specific pesticides known as organophosphate-based insecticides, which make up a third of the market, according to the release.

Journal Reference:
Jing Chen, James Webb, Kaavian Shariati, et al. Pollen-inspired enzymatic microparticles to reduce organophosphate toxicity in managed pollinators, Nature Food (DOI: 10.1038/s43016-021-00282-0)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

QUIC is Now RFC 9000:

QUIC is a new latency-reducing, reliable, and secure internet transport protocol that is slated to replace TCP, the most commonly used transport today.

[...] The IETF just published QUIC as RFC 9000, supported by RFC 9001, RFC 9002, and RFC 8999. That means QUIC version 1 is officially formalized, and QUIC deployments will now move away from using temporary draft versions to the newly minted version 1. (HTTP/3, the version of HTTP that runs on QUIC, is following closely behind, and should be published soon.)

QUIC Version 1 is Live on Cloudflare:

The killer feature of QUIC, however, is that it is deployable in reality. We are excited to announce that QUIC version 1, RFC 9000, is available to all Cloudflare customers. We started with a limited beta in 2018, we made it general availability in 2019, and we've been tracking new document revisions every step of the way. In that time we've seen User-Agents like browsers join us in this merry march and prove that this thing works on the Internet.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A Driverless Truck Got a Shipment Cross-Country 10 Hours Faster Than a Human Driver:

Last month TuSimple, a transportation company focused on self-driving technology for heavy-duty trucks, shipped a truckload of watermelons from Arizona to Oklahoma using the truck's autonomous system for over 80 percent of the journey. The starting point was Nogales, at Arizon's southern end right on the border with Mexico. A human driver took the wheel for the first 60 miles or so, from Nogales to Tucson—but from there the truck went on auto-pilot, and not just for a little while. It drove itself all the way to Dallas, 950 miles to the east (there was a human safety driver on board the whole time, but not controlling the truck).

[...] From Dallas, the human driver took over again and drove the final 200 miles to a distribution center in Oklahoma City. From there, the watermelons were inspected—nothing to see here, they were in better shape than they would've been with a human driving the whole time—then distributed to stores all over the state.

Fnord666 writes:

It looks like the launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope has slipped again. It was slated to launch this coming Halloween but now it will be at mid-November at the earliest.

According to Ars Technica:

Last summer, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) set an October 31, 2021, launch date for the $10 billion telescope. The instrument, which is the largest science observatory ever placed into space, will launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana. Now, however, three considerations have pushed the launch into November or possibly early December.

[...] The launch campaign, which begins when the telescope arrives in French Guiana, requires 55 days. Asked whether this means that Webb will not launch until mid-November at the earliest, Zurbuchen said this assessment was correct.

Engadget added:

A delay of a few weeks is not much, considering the initial launch timeframe was around 2007. Still, there are reasons for optimism. Pushing back the launch by weeks rather than months or years is an indication that the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter for the successor to Hubble.

Previously:

1. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Passes Crucial Launch-Simulation Tests
2. NASA's Webb to Examine Objects in the Graveyard of the Solar System
3. NASA Ominously Chooses Halloween 2021 to Launch Long-Delayed Space Telescope
4. James Webb Space Telescope Will "Absolutely" Not Launch in March
5. New Exoplanet Life Detection Method for James Webb Telescope

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Meat Producer JBS Says Expects Most Plants Working Wednesday:

A ransomware attack on the world's largest meat processing company disrupted production around the world just weeks after a similar incident shut down a U.S. oil pipeline.

Brazil's JBS SA, however, said late Tuesday that it had made "significant progress" in dealing with the cyberattack and expected the "vast majority" of its plants to be operating on Wednesday.

"Our systems are coming back online and we are not sparing any resources to fight this threat," Andre Nogueira, the CEO of JBS USA said in a statement.

[...] JBS is the second-largest producer of beef, pork and chicken in the U.S. If it were to shut down for even one day, the U.S. would lose almost a quarter of its beef-processing capacity, or the equivalent of 20,000 beef cows, according to Trey Malone, an assistant professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.

JBS said the cyberattack affected servers supporting its operations in North America and Australia. The company said it notified authorities and engaged third-party experts to resolve the problem as soon as possible. Backup servers weren't affected.

Malone said the disruption could further raise meat prices ahead of summer barbecues. Even before the attack, U.S. meat prices were rising due to coronavirus shutdowns, bad weather and high plant absenteeism. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said it expects beef prices to climb 1% to 2% this year, poultry as much as 1.5% and pork between by from 2% and 3%.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Amazon Faced 75,000 Arbitration Demands. Now It Says: Fine, Sue Us:

Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don't allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action.

Now, [Amazon.com] Inc. is bucking that trend. With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company's Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission.

The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs' lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users. That move triggered a bill for tens of millions of dollars in filing fees, according to lawyers involved, payable by Amazon under its own policies.

Amazon's decision to drop its arbitration requirement is the starkest example yet of how companies are responding to plaintiffs' lawyers pushing the arbitration system to its limits.

Previously:
'Scared to Death' by Arbitration: Companies Drowning in Their Own System

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Raspberry Pi Announces RP2040 Chips For $1

Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon.

[...] The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced they have shipped over 600k Raspberry Pi Pico boards this year and orders for another 700k. More creators and other businesses meanwhile have been seeking to build out their own wares using the RP2040 chip, which has now led the group to offering the chip for $1 USD in single-unit sales. By this autumn they expect "serious volume" of the RP2040 chips for those looking to build out their own wares with this tasty silicon.

Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1

Also at CNX Software. Alasdair Allan says:

Today's announcement is for single unit quantity only. We're still figuring out what reel-scale pricing will look like in the autumn, but we expect it to be significantly lower than that.

Previously: Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit
Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS

Original Submission