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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/apples-tim-cook-sideloading-is-not-in-the-best-interests-of-the-user/

Apple has been under a mountain of scrutiny lately from legislators, developers, judges, and users. Amidst all that, CEO Tim Cook sat with publication Brut. to discuss Apple's strategy and policies. The short [29m58s] but wide-ranging interview offered some insight into where Apple plans to go in the future.

As is so common when Tim Cook speaks publicly, privacy was a major focus. His response to a question about its importance was the same one we've heard from him many times, "We see it as a basic human right, a fundamental human right," noting that Apple has been focused on privacy for a long time.

[...] But beyond regulations strictly centered on privacy, he wasn't as effusive. "As I look at the tech regulations that's being discussed, I think there are good parts of it and then I think there are parts of it that are not in the best interests of the user," he said.

As an example of the latter, he said that "the current DMA[*] language that is being discussed would force sideloading on the iPhone." He added:

[*] DMA: Digital Markets Act on Wikipedia.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

China space station: Shenzhou-12 delivers first crew to Tianhe module

China has launched three astronauts into orbit to begin occupation of the country's new space station.

The three men - Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo - are to spend three months aboard the Tianhe module some 380km (236 miles) above the Earth.

It will be China's longest crewed space mission to date and the first in nearly five years.

The crew successfully docked with the space station just over seven hours after the launch.

China, Russia reveal roadmap for international moon base

Russia and China unveiled a roadmap for a joint International Lunar Research Station Wednesday to guide collaboration and development of the project.

Chinese and Russian space officials revealed the plans June 16 at the Global Space Exploration (GLEX) conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, stating that the ILRS has received the interest of a number of countries and organizations.

Also at Washington Post.

Previously: Rocket in Place to Send 3 Crew to Chinese Space Station

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/ddos-fugitive-commander-x-arrested-in-mexico-extradited-to-us/

A decade after Chris "Commander X" Doyon skipped out on a federal hacking charge and fled the country, the long arm of US law enforcement this week stretched out its hand and plucked him from Mexico City, where he had claimed political asylum. Doyon now faces all of the original charges for coordinating a 2010 High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) DDoS attack on servers belonging to Santa Cruz, California, plus a serious new charge for jumping bail. This has been a surprising turn of events for the homeless hacktivist, who spent his years first in Canada and then in Mexico issuing press releases, hanging out on Twitter, writing a self-published memoir, appearing in documentaries, and meeting up with journalists like me—all without apparent response from the US government.

All that changed on June 11, when Doyon was arrested by Mexican police. This was confirmed by a press release from the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, where Santa Cruz is located, though no details were provided.

(...) The original DDoS incident in Santa Cruz was relatively minor. It was triggered by a new law affecting the homeless community of which Doyon was a part, and it affected Santa Cruz servers for just 30 minutes. The government claimed only a few thousand dollars in damages for investigation and remediation, but the amount was just enough to clear the $5,000 threshold of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, making the DDoS a federal crime.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Aging NASA Hubble Space Telescope hustles to survive latest technical glitch:

The Hubble Space Telescope has spent over three decades scanning the cosmos, bringing us glorious images and data from our universe. The spacecraft is showing its age. The Hubble team is now troubleshooting a problem with the telescope's payload computer -- a piece of hardware built in the 1980s -- that controls its science instruments.

The computer issue cropped up on Sunday. "After analyzing the data, the Hubble operations team is investigating whether a degrading memory module led to the computer halt," NASA said in a statement on Wednesday. Hubble is a joint project from NASA and the European Space Agency.

"After the halt occurred on Sunday, the main computer stopped receiving a 'keep alive' signal, which is a standard handshake between the payload and main spacecraft computers to indicate all is well," NASA said. "The main computer then automatically placed all science instruments in a safe mode configuration."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Nasty Linux systemd root level security bug revealed and patched:

This obnoxious Linux systemd bug has been fixed, which means if you're running most recent Linux distributions, you'll need to patch it now.

The good news is the seven-year-old security bug in Linux systemd's polkit, used in many Linux distros, has been patched. The bad news is that it was ever there in the first place. Polkit, which systemd uses in place of sudo, enables unauthorized users to run privileged processes they'd otherwise couldn't run. It turned out that you could also abuse polkit to get root access to a system. 

The power to grab root privileges is the ultimate evil in Unix and Linux systems. Kevin Backhouse, a member of the GitHub Security Lab, found the polkit security hole in the course of his duties. He revealed it to the polkit maintainers and Red Hat's security team. Then, when a fix was released on June 3, 2021, it was publicly disclosed as CVE-2021-3560.

martyb writes:

Last night (actually, very early this morning) mechanicjay generated and installed new Let's Encrypt certs for our servers.

I made a quick check and everything seems to be in place. The old certs were due to expire right about now, so if you do have any issues, please pop onto IRC (preferred) or reply here and let us know!

Thanks mechanicjay!

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Monkey-Human hybrids are real (at least as short-lived embryos). While interesting to see what would have become of it, this is also quite scary. Not quite sure this is the direction I want science to go in.

First Monkey–Human Embryos Reignite Debate Over Hybrid Animals[1]:

Scientists have successfully grown monkey embryos containing human cells for the first time — the latest milestone in a rapidly advancing field that has drawn ethical questions.

In the work, published on 15 April in Cell, the team injected monkey embryos with human stem cells and watched them develop. They observed human and monkey cells divide and grow together in a dish, with at least 3 embryos surviving to 19 days after fertilization. “The overall message is that every embryo contained human cells that proliferate and differentiate to a different extent,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a developmental biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and one of the researchers who led the work.

Researchers hope that some human–animal hybrids — known as chimaeras — could provide better models in which to test drugs, and be used to grow human organs for transplants. Members of this research team were the first to show in 2019 that they could grow monkey embryos in a dish for up to 20 days after fertilization. In 2017, they reported a series of other hybrids: pig embryos grown with human cells, cow embryos grown with human cells, and rat embryos grown with mouse cells.

[2021-06-17 15:18:18 UTC] Update: Added links to journal article and video... Thanks to AC's comments!--martyb]

Eratosthenes writes:

Reporting on the Associated Press

A critical Antarctic glacier is looking more vulnerable as satellite images show the ice shelf that blocks it from collapsing into the sea is breaking up much faster than before and spawning huge icebergs, a new study says.

The Pine Island Glacier's ice shelf loss accelerated in 2017, causing scientists to worry that with climate change the glacier's collapse could happen quicker than the many centuries predicted. The floating ice shelf acts like a cork in a bottle for the fast-melting glacier and prevents its much larger ice mass from flowing into the ocean.

That ice shelf has retreated by 12 miles (20 kilometers) between 2017 and 2020, according to a study in Friday's Science Advances The crumbling shelf was caught on time-lapse video from a European satellite that takes pictures every six days.

"You can see stuff just tearing apart," said study lead author Ian Joughin, a University of Washington glaciologist. "So it almost looks like the speed-up itself is weakening the glacier. ... And so far we've lost maybe 20% of the main shelf."

Between 2017 and 2020, there were three large breakup events, creating icebergs more than 5 miles (8 kilometers) long and 22 miles (36 kilometers) wide, which then split into lots of littler pieces, Joughin said. There also were many smaller breakups.

"It's not at all inconceivable that the whole shelf could give way and go within a few years," Joughin said. "I'd say that's a long shot, but not a very long shot."

Joughin tracked two points on the main glacier and found they were moving 12% faster toward the sea starting in 2017.

A watched pot never boils, but a watched glacier tries to impress us with its speed?

A 4m55s video from the study is available at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2021/06/07/7.24.eabg3080.DC1/abg3080_Movie_S1.mp4

Journal Reference:
Ian Joughin, Daniel Shapero, Ben Smith, et al. Ice-shelf retreat drives recent Pine Island Glacier speedup [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg3080)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/after-ruining-75m-jj-doses-emergent-gets-fda-clearance-for-25m-doses/

The US Food and Drug Administration is making progress in its efforts to sort out the fiasco at Emergent BioSolutions' Baltimore facility, which, at this point, has ruined more than 75 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines stemming from what the regulator identified as significant quality control failures.

In March, news leaked that Emergent ruined 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine as well as millions more doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine. The spoilage happened when Emergent cross-contaminated batches of the two vaccines with ingredients from the other.

Last week, the FDA told Emergent to trash about 60 million more doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine due to similar contamination concerns, The New York Times reported.

[...] FDA cleared an additional 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine, bringing the total number of acceptable doses to just 25 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/amazon-blames-social-media-companies-for-sales-of-fake-amazon-reviews/

Amazon today said it can't stop fake product reviews without help from social media companies, and it blamed those companies for not doing more to prevent solicitation of fake reviews.

In a blog post, Amazon said its own "continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts" has led to "an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services."

Original Submission

Largest Rotating Structures in the Universe Discovered – Fantastic Cosmic Filaments Where Galaxies Are Relatively Just Specs of Dust:

Cosmic filaments are huge bridges of galaxies and dark matter that connect clusters of galaxies to each other. They funnel galaxies towards and into large clusters that sit at their ends. "By mapping the motion of galaxies in these huge cosmic superhighways using the Sloan Digital Sky survey – a survey of hundreds of thousands of galaxies – we found a remarkable property of these filaments: they spin." says Peng Wang, first author of the now published study and astronomer at the AIP.

"Despite being thin cylinders – similar in dimension to pencils – hundreds of millions of light years long, but just a few million light years in diameter, these fantastic tendrils of matter rotate," adds Noam Libeskind, initiator of the project at the AIP. "On these scales the galaxies within them are themselves just specs of dust. They move on helixes or corkscrew like orbits, circling around the middle of the filament while travelling along it. Such a spin has never been seen before on such enormous scales, and the implication is that there must be an as yet unknown physical mechanism responsible for torquing these objects."

[...] "Motivated by the suggestion from the theorist Dr. Mark Neyrinck that filaments may spin, we examined the observed galaxy distribution, looking for filament rotation," says Noam Libeskind. "It's fantastic to see this confirmation that intergalactic filaments rotate in the real Universe, as well as in computer simulation." By using a sophisticated mapping method, the observed galaxy distribution was segmented into filaments. Each filament was approximated by a cylinder.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-people-fall-for-conspiracy-theories/

Think of a conspiracy theorist. How do they see the world? What stands out to them? What fades into the background? Now think of yourself. How does the way you see things differ? What is it about the way you think that has stopped you from falling down a rabbit hole?

Conspiracy theories have long been part of American life, but they feel more urgent than ever. Innocuous notions like whether the moon landing was a hoax feel like child's play compared to more impactful beliefs like whether vaccines are safe (they are) or the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn't). It can be easy to write off our conspiracy theorist friends and relatives as crackpots, but science shows things are far more nuanced than that. There are traits that likely prime people to be more prone to holding these beliefs, and you may find that when you take stock of these traits, you aren't far removed from your cousin who is convinced the world is run by lizard people.

[...] "It's not like most beliefs are arrived at through some sort of pure logic. The world is not a bunch of Spocks running around deducing everything," said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami who has studied conspiracy theories. "It's just not how people operate."

[...] Every one of us has a brain that takes shortcuts, makes assumptions and works in irrational ways. The sooner we recognize that, and stop treating loved ones who have adopted conspiratorial beliefs as lost causes, the better we may be at curbing the beliefs that threaten our democracy and public health. We're all human after all. Well, except for the lizard people.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX ignored last-minute warnings from the FAA before December Starship launch

Minutes before liftoff, Elon Musk's SpaceX ignored at least two warnings from the Federal Aviation Administration that launching its first high-altitude Starship prototype last December would violate the company's launch license, confidential documents and letters obtained by The Verge show. And while SpaceX was under investigation, it told the FAA that the agency's software was a "source of frustration" that has been "shown to be inaccurate at times or overly conservative," according to the documents.

[...] Neither SpaceX nor Musk has publicly commented on the SN8 violation. SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment. The FAA confirmed the violation after a report by The Verge in January. But a confidential five-page report by SpaceX and letters between Shotwell and Monteith reveal what SpaceX employees knew before liftoff and detail how the company responded to its violation in the aftermath.

[...] SpaceX employees left the FAA meeting for the company's launch control room ahead of SN8's launch. Minutes before liftoff, an FAA safety inspector speaking on an open phone line warned SpaceX's staff in the launch control room that a launch would violate the company's launch license. SpaceX staff ignored the warning because they "assumed that the inspector did not have the latest information," the SpaceX report said.

progo writes:

Yesterday I got this global notice on Freenode IRC network:

We are moving past legacy freenode to a new fork. The new freenode is launched. You will slowly be disconnected and when you reconnect, you will be on the new freenode. We patiently await to welcome you in freedom's holdout - the freenode.

If you're looking to connect now, you can already /server chat.freenode.net 6697 (ssl) or 6667 (plaintext). It's a new genesis for a new era. Thank you for using freenode, and Hello World, from the future. freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS. freenode is freedom.

When you connect, register your nickname and your channel and get started. It's a new world. We're so happy to welcome you and the millions of others. We will be posting more information in the coming days on our website and twitter. Otherwise, see you on the other side!

I didn't notice it until I was disconnected and reconnected today and found myself cancelled on the network. Since there is no blog post mentioned in the system notice, I went looking and I found a summary of this week's drama from Hugo Landau.

Windows 11 Build Leaks Ahead of Launch

takyon writes:

Exclusive | First impressions of Windows 11 aka Sun Valley from a leaked ISO — A much needed visual overhaul that does not alienate long-time users

We've been hearing about Microsoft's upcoming major update to Windows 10 for quite some time now. Codenamed Sun Valley, information so far on the internet indicated deep changes to the OS and the UI. We have also come across news that pointed to the Sun Valley update being likely christened as Windows 11. We can now confirm that it the next version of Windows will indeed be called Windows 11.

We have managed to get our hands on a leaked build of the OS. Given that we are just about 10 days from the official unveiling, we don't expect too many changes from the current build 21996.1 to the RTM candidate, but it still helps to be skeptical till launch.

[...] Microsoft will take wraps off Windows 11 on June 24. It is possible that the company may show off a few more visual changes not seen in these leaked builds. For now, take a look at the screenshots below and let us know what you think. We are still fiddling around with the build and will update this article if we come across anything noteworthy.

Also at The Verge and Videocardz.

See also: Make way for Windows 11? Windows 10 end-of-life is October 2025