SoylentNews

Steam Deck is Valve's Switch-like portable PC: Starting at $399 this December

Freeman writes:

Steam Deck is Valve's Switch-like portable PC, starting at $399 this December

On Thursday, Valve took the wraps off its new Switch-like portable PC, now dubbed the Steam Deck, confirming that it is indeed the hardware Ars Technica wrote about earlier this year. The device will begin shipping later this year at a starting price of $399.

The hefty-looking console, which is 11.7 inches long, will launch at three price points, differentiated by built-in storage capacity, SSD speed ratings, and differently tempered glass on its screen. Those particular upgrades will cost $529 (256GB) and $649 (512GB, "anti-glare etched glass"). Both pricier bundles include a carrying case.

Valve Announces the "Steam Deck", a Handheld Gaming PC

takyon writes:

Valve has announced a handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck:

upstart writes:

may-they-panick-in-peace

Facebook Users Said No to Tracking -- Now Advertisers are Panicking:

When users get asked on iPhone devices if they'd like to be tracked, the vast majority say no. That's worrying Facebook Inc.'s advertisers, who are losing access to some of their most valuable targeting data and have already seen a decrease in effectiveness of their ads.

The new prompt from Apple Inc., which arrived in an iOS software update to iPhones in early June, explicitly asks users of each app whether they are willing to be tracked across their internet activity. Most are saying no, according to Branch, which analyzes mobile app growth. People are giving apps permission to track their behavior just 25% of the time, Branch found, severing a data pipeline that has powered the targeted advertising industry for years.

"It's been pretty devastating for I would say the majority of advertisers," said Eric Seufert, a mobile analyst who writes the Mobile Dev Memo trade blog. "The big question is: Are we seeing just short-term volatility where we can expect a move back to the mean, or is this a new normal?"

upstart writes:

Watch Robots Make Pizzas From Start to Finish at an Automated Pizzeria:

At Pazzi Pizzeria—or, as the owners are calling it, Pazziria—customers place their orders on screens at self-service terminals, then they can watch a team of robots working in concert to deliver up their pizza. In fact, the spectacle seems as important as the food; a sign outside the restaurant encourages passerby to "Come for the show, stay for the pizza."

The "show" starts with a robot grabbing a handful of dough and depositing it on a pan, where another bot flattens it, a third applies tomato sauce, etc. From dough-grabbing to inserting in the oven, preparing a pizza takes just 45 seconds. The oven can bake 6 pizzas at a time, yielding about 80 pizzas per hour. Once a pizza is baked to gooey perfection, a robot slices it and places it in a box, and it's then transferred (by a robot, of course) to a numbered cubby from which the customer can retrieve it.

It's a shame the pizzeria didn't open during the height of the pandemic, as its revenues likely would have gone through the roof given that there's zero person-to-person contact required for you to get a fresh, custom-made pizza in your hands (and more importantly, your belly!).

Pazzi's creators spent eight years researching and developing the pizza bots, and they say the hardest part was getting the bots to work effectively with the raw dough. Since it's made with yeast, the dough is sensitive to changes in temperature, humidity, and other factors, and for optimal results it needs to be rolled out and baked with very precise timing.

"It's a very fast process, the timing is perfectly controlled, and quality is assured because the robots are consistent," said Pazzi co-founder Sebastien Roverso. He added that engineers monitor the bots remotely, and if needed they can take control of them and fix any issues.

Pazzi has many pictures on their Press Page. There is also a promotional video on YouTube as well as a French-language reporter documenting her visit to Pazzi, also on YouTube.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

uBlock Origin (and uMatrix) DoS With Strict-Blocking Filter and Crafted URL (Archived).

uBlock Origin (uBO) is a browser extension that blocks ads, security risks, privacy risks, and other web annoyances. One of its features is "strict blocking," which prevents all connections—​including direct navigations—​to resources that match strict filters.

Strict filters are most often used to block sites that perform affiliate redirects, serve malware, or are otherwise undesirable to visit. They are typically applied at the domain level (e.g., googlesyndication.com) and tend to resemble entries in hosts files, though they can also target more specific resources.

Strict blocking works by opening a warning page that provides information about the blocked resource, including its URL and the filter that prevented the resource from loading. The warning page also displays query parameters from the blocked URL to help users bypass redirect tracking.

In earlier versions of uBO, these parameters were parsed recursively and added to the DOM without any depth checks, which could lead to extension crashes and memory exhaustion, depending on the browser and hardware. uMatrix and ηMatrix, a fork of uMatrix compatible with Pale Moon, share similar code for displaying parsed URL parameters.

Users should upgrade to uBO 1.36.2 and ηMatrix 4.4.9 to receive fixes for this security vulnerability, which affects the default configurations of both extensions. The uBO Edge extension and the uBO (Legacy) extension have separate release processes and are still vulnerable.

The story source url has Discussion, Vulnerability [Code], Impact and scope, PoCs and so forth.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Russia To Build RISC-V Processors for Laptops: 8-core, 2 GHz, 12nm, 2025

Russian outlet Vedomosti.ru today is reporting that the conglomerate Rostec, a Russian state-backed corporation specializing in investment in technology, has penned a deal with server company Yadro and silicon design company Sintakor to develop RISC-V processors for computers, laptops, and servers. Initial reports are suggesting that Sintakor will develop a powerful enough RISC-V design to power government and education systems by 2025.

The cost of the project is reported to be around 30 billion rubles ($400m), with that the organizers of the project plan to sell 60,000 systems based around new processors containing RISC-V cores as the main processing cores. The reports state that the goal is to build an 8-core processor, running at 2 GHz, using a 12-nanometer process, which presumably means GlobalFoundries but at this point it is unclear. Out of the project funding, two-thirds will be provided by 'anchor customers' (such as Rostec and subsidiaries), while the final third will come from the federal budget. The systems these processors will go into will operate initially at Russia's Ministry of Education and Science, as well as the Ministry of Health.

Previously: Russian Homegrown Elbrus-4C CPU Released
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched
Programming Guide for Russia's "28nm" Elbrus-8CB CPU Published

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Pesticide caused kids' brain damage, California lawsuits say:

Lawsuits filed Monday in California seek potential class-action damages from Dow Chemical and its successor company over a widely used bug killer linked to brain damage in children.

Chlorpyrifos is approved for use on more than 80 crops, including oranges, berries, grapes, soybeans, almonds and walnuts, though California banned sales of the pesticide last year and spraying of it this year. Some other states, including New York, have moved to ban it. Stuart Calwell, lead attorney in the lawsuits, argued that its effects linger in Central Valley agricultural communities contaminated by chlorpyrifos during decades of use, with measurable levels still found in his clients' homes.

Lawyers project that at least 100,000 homes in the nation's largest agricultural state may need to dispose of most of their belongings because they are contaminated with the pesticide. "We have found it in the houses, we have found it in carpet, in upholstered furniture, we found it in a teddy bear, and we found it on the walls and surfaces," Calwell said. "Then a little child picks up a teddy bear and holds on to it."

[...] Corteva stopped producing the pesticide last year. The Delaware-based company was created after a merger of Dow Chemical and Dupont and had been the world's largest manufacturer of chlorpyrifos. The company has said it believes the product is safe and said it stopped production because of declining sales.

Scientific studies have shown that chlorpyrifos damages the brains of fetuses and children. It was first used in 1965 but was banned for household use in 2001.

More information on Chlorpyrifos at Wikipedia and EPA.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google fined €500 million in France over bad faith negotiations with news outlets:

Google is being fined €500 million by France's Competition Authority over bad faith negotiations with news publishers, CNBC reports. Google agreed to comply with France's orders in January in order to get French publishers to participate in its News Showcase product.

Google is accused of failing to negotiate in good faith with news publishers.

France was one of the first European nations to put into action the EU Copyright Directive, which came into force in 2019 and allows publishers to request remuneration for displaying their content. Last year, the country told Google it must negotiate licensing fees with publishers or face penalties. But a coalition of French news publishers complained to the competition authority that the company was not following orders.

"We hoped that the negotiation would be fruitful and that the actors would play the game. Google still does not seem to accept the law as it was voted, but it is not up to an actor, even a dominant one, to rewrite the law," the authority's president, Isabelle de Silva, told Politico.

See also: Google hit with record $593 million fine in France in news copyright battle and https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/13/google-fined-592m-in-france-for-breaching-antitrust-order-to-negotiate-news-copyright-fees/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

They stole prized lumber from a national forest. The trees' DNA proved it, feds say.:

In a first for a federal criminal trial, prosecutors used tree DNA to prove the remains matched that of the timber the men sold to local mills.

The tree genetics convinced jury members in Tacoma, Wash., and on Thursday they convicted Justin Andrew Wilke for his role in the theft and trafficking of illegally reaped timber.

Wilke and Shawn Edward Williams were charged with multiple felonies related to the scheme in September 2019. Williams pleaded guilty in December 2019 to stealing the trees and setting the fire. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison last September.

[...] The Olympic National Forest is known for its towering, lush and wide-trunked trees. The bigleaf maple[*] is among the more prized inhabitants — its patterned wood often coveted for woodworking and manufacturing musical instruments. But it is illegal to chop down trees in national forests without a permit.

[...] Wilke made $400 to $7,000 on the sales, court documents showed.

During Wilke's six-day trial earlier this month, prosecutors presented evidence from Richard Cronn, a research geneticist for the Agriculture Department's Forest Service, who proved that the lumber Wilke sold was a genetic match to the remains of three vandalized bigleaf maples in the national forest.

Anti-aristarchus writes:

Teardrop star reveals hidden supernova doom:

Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiraling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star.

The tragic shape is caused by a massive nearby white dwarf distorting the star with its intense gravity, which will also be the catalyst for an eventual supernova that will consume both. Found by an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists led by the University of Warwick, it is one of only very small number of star systems that has been discovered that will one day see a white dwarf star reignite its core.

New research published by the team today in Nature Astronomy confirms that the two stars are in the early stages of a spiral that will likely end in a Type Ia supernova, a type that helps astronomers determine how fast the universe is expanding.

[...] Type Ia supernovae are important for cosmology as 'standard candles'. Their brightness is constant and of a specific type of light, which means astronomers can compare what luminosity they should be with what we observe on Earth, and from that work out how distant they are with a good degree of accuracy. By observing supernovae in distant galaxies, astronomers combine what they know of how fast this galaxy is moving with our distance from the supernova and calculate the expansion of the universe.

[...] "There is another discrepancy between the estimated and observed galactic supernovae rate, and the number of progenitors we see. We can estimate how many supernovae are going to be in our galaxy through observing many galaxies, or through what we know from stellar evolution, and this number is consistent. But if we look for objects that can become supernovae, we don't have enough. This discovery was very useful to put an estimate of what a hot subdwarf and white dwarf binaries can contribute. It still doesn't seem to be a lot, none of the channels we observed seems to be enough."

Journal Reference:
Ingrid Pelisoli, P. Neunteufel, S. Geier, et al. A hot subdwarf–white dwarf super-Chandrasekhar candidate supernova Ia progenitor, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01413-0)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Firefox 89 delivered more speed:

Today, Mozilla launched Firefox 90. The newest version of Mozilla's increasingly privacy-focused browser adds improved print-to-PDF functionality, individual exceptions to HTTPS-only mode, an about:third-party page to help identify compatibility issues introduced by third-party applications, and a new SmartBlock feature that cranks up protection from cross-site tracking while making sure site logins still function.

There's also a new background updater for Windows, which allows a small background application to check for, download, and install Firefox updates while the browser is not running.

[...] With SmartBlock 2.0, Facebook scripts are disabled on third-party sites, just as before—but when the user clicks the "Continue with Facebook" option, that specific, deliberate user interaction with the Facebook script causes SmartBlock 2.0 to unblock it. The unblocking happens just in time to allow the Facebook authentication login to succeed—without the user needing to dial down their tracking protection settings.

[...] Mozilla's internal metrics show significant speed improvements in 2021—last month's Firefox 89 is 10-30 percent faster than earlier versions, according to Mozilla's own testing. Specifically, the Mozilla team mentions improvement in the following areas:

• Typing in the URL bar or in document editors (e.g., Google Docs, Office 365)
• Opening a site menu (such as the file menu in Google Docs)
• Keyboard controls in browser-based video games

[...] Beginning with Firefox 89, an update to Firefox's painting pipeline suggested by Markus Strange improves the situation significantly—now, painting can happen during the same frame that user input occurs, making compositing possible one frame earlier. This makes maximally responsive interaction roughly 17 ms faster than it was before—a solid third of the self-imposed instantaneous window.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Alzheimer's symptoms could be due to decline in brain protein not accumulation of amyloid plaques:

Experts estimate more than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's dementia. But a recent study, led by the University of Cincinnati, sheds new light on the disease and a highly debated new drug therapy.

The UC-led study, conducted in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, claims that the treatment of Alzheimer's disease might lie in normalizing the levels of a specific brain protein called amyloid-beta peptide. This protein is needed in its original, soluble form to keep the brain healthy, but sometimes it hardens into "brain stones" or clumps, called amyloid plaques.

[...] "It's not the plaques that are causing impaired cognition,'' says Alberto Espay, the new study's senior author and professor of neurology at UC. "Amyloid plaques are a consequence, not a cause," of Alzheimer's disease, says Espay, who is also a member of the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute.

[...] Cognitive impairment could be due to a decline in soluble amyloid-beta peptide instead of the corresponding accumulation of amyloid plaques. To test their hypothesis, they analyzed the brain scans and spinal fluid from 600 individuals enrolled in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study, who all had amyloid plaques. From there, they compared the amount of plaques and levels of the peptide in the individuals with normal cognition to those with cognitive impairment. They found that, regardless of the amount of plaques in the brain, the individuals with high levels of the peptide were cognitively normal.

They also found that higher levels of soluble amyloid-beta peptide were associated with a larger hippocampus, the area of the brain most important for memory.

According to the authors, as we age most people develop amyloid plagues, but few people develop dementia. In fact, by the age of 85, 60% of people will have these plagues, but only 10% develop dementia, they say.

Journal Reference:
Andrea Sturchio. High cerebrospinal amyloid-β 42 is associated with normal cognition in individuals with brain amyloidosis, EClinicalMedicine (DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100988)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Demonstration of World Record: 319 Tb/s Transmission over 3,001 km with 4-core fiber:

Researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.), Network Research Institute, succeeded the first S, C and L-bands transmission over long-haul distances in a 4-core optical fiber with standard outer diameter (0.125 mm). The researchers, lead by Benjamin J. Puttnam, constructed a transmission system that makes full use of wavelength division multiplexing technology by combining different amplifier technologies, to achieve a transmission demonstration with date-rate of 319 terabits per second, over a distance of 3,001 km. Using a common comparison metric of optical fiber transmission the data-rate and distance produce of 957 petabits per second x km, is a world record for optical fibers with standard outer diameter.

In this demonstration, in addition to the C and L-bands, typically used for high-data-rate, long-haul transmission, we utilize the transmission bandwidth of the S-band, which has not yet been used for further than single span transmission. The combined >120nm transmission bandwidth allowed 552 wavelength-division multiplexed channels by adopting 2 kinds of doped-fiber amplifier together with distributed Raman amplification, to enable recirculating transmission of the wideband signal. The standard cladding diameter, 4-core optical fiber can be cabled with existing equipment, and it is hoped that such fibers can enable practical high data-rate transmission in the near-term, contributing to the realization of the backbone communications system, necessary for the spread of new communication services Beyond 5G.

The results of this experiment were accepted as a post-deadline paper presentation at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications (OFC 2021).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cow manure methane may soon fuel cars, heat homes in Arizona:

A new energy facility southwest of Phoenix scheduled to open in December will capture methane from cow manure and reuse the biogas as renewable natural fuel.

Facility stakeholders told The Arizona Republic the process will capture harmful gases that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and exacerbate climate change.

The project is a partnership between West Virginia-based renewable energy company Avolta and the Butterfield Dairy Farm in Buckeye.

[...] Unlike electric utilities in Arizona, which must generate 15% of their energy from renewable sources by 2025, Southwest Gas has no such required standard, according to the newspaper.

[...] Avolta officials said the emissions savings from Butterfield Dairy will be equivalent to removing 3,500 cars from the road each year. Combined with the upcoming Maricopa facility, emissions savings will equate to 8,000 cars off the road.

Some 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of cow manure will be stored in an underground sealed container at the Avolta site for about 22 days at a time while it undergoes the "anaerobic digestion" process that creates biogas.

[...] The Butterfield cows' waste will transform into biogas, mostly made up of methane and carbon dioxide, and digestate — leftover manure stripped of most of its methane and carbon dioxide.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Million cubic metre 90GWh thermal storage project in Finland could begin construction next year:

A seasonal heat storage plant which will have a capacity of about 90GWh looks set to begin construction next year in Vantaa, Finland, with water stored in underground caverns heated to 140°C using renewable energy and waste heat.

City energy company Vantaa Energy said at the beginning of this month that it has selected engineering, design and advisory group AFRY and Finnish urban development and construction company YIT as project partners. Project development begins this summer and construction in autumn next year, with the massive system expected to be online during 2026.

The project, called Vantaa Energy Cavern Thermal Energy Storage (VECTES), will involve caverns around 60 metres underground in bedrock. According to project overview documents produced by Vantaa, situating the water storage that far down means the ground water's natural pressure will prevent it from evaporating, even at temperatures above its boiling point.

upstart writes:

Cerne Giant in Dorset dates from Anglo-Saxon times, analysis suggests:

Sand samples examined by National Trust experts indicate hillside chalk figure was created in the 10th century

[...] Over the centuries the huge, naked, club-wielding giant carved into a steep hillside in Dorset has been thought prehistoric, Celtic, Roman or even a 17th century lampoon of Oliver Cromwell.

After 12 months of new, hi-tech sediment analysis, the National Trust has now revealed the probable truth and experts admit they are taken aback. The bizarre, enigmatic Cerne Giant is none of the above, but late Saxon, possibly 10th century.

Martin Papworth, a senior archaeologist at the trust, said he was somewhat "flabbergasted ... He's not prehistoric, he's not Roman, he's sort of Saxon, into the medieval period. I was expecting 17th century."

The geoarchaeologist Mike Allen, who has been researching microscopic snails in the sediment, agreed. "This is not what was expected," he said. "Many archaeologists and historians thought he was prehistoric or post-medieval, but not medieval. Everyone was wrong, and that makes these results even more exciting."

The research has involved studying samples, which show when individual grains of sand in the sediment were last exposed to sunlight. Material from the deepest layer suggest a date range of 700-AD1100.

It was in the middle of that date range, AD978, that Cerne Abbey was founded nearby.

[...] At 180ft (55 metres) the Cerne Giant is Britain's largest, rudest and as a result best-known chalk hill figure. He is also the most mysterious.

Wikipedia entry on Cerne Abbas Giant (with picture).

Original Submission