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upstart writes:

US issues new terrorism threat warning ahead of 9/11 anniversary - France 24:

The US Department of Homeland Security issued a new terrorism threat advisory on Friday ahead of the anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks and amid a resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic.

The National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin said the United States faces a "heightened threat environment" from both domestic terrorists "and those inspired or motivated by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences."

It cited increased use of "online forums to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and promote violent activity."

The new advisory updated a January alert following the attack on the US Congress by supporters of then-president Donald Trump, when DHS said the country faced "increasingly complex and volatile" threats from anti-government and racially motivated extremists, often stirred up by online influence from abroad.

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upstart writes:

Sonos gets early patent victory against Google smart speakers:

Sonos scored an early victory in its case against Google Friday, when the US International Trade Commission ruled that Google infringed five of Sonos' smart speaker patents. The ruling is preliminary and subject to a full ITC review, but it could lead to a ban on Google smart speakers.

In January 2020, Sonos brought a patent infringement case against Google targeting Google's smart speakers, the Google Home, and later the Nest Audio line. Sonos is the originator of Internet-connected speakers that easily hook up to streaming services, while Google speakers combine a similar feature set with voice-activated Google Assistant commands. To hear Sonos tell the story, Google got a behind-the-scenes look at Sonos' hardware in 2013, when Google agreed to build Google Play Music support for Sonos speakers. Sonos claims Google used that access to "blatantly and knowingly" copy Sonos' audio features for the Google Home speaker, which launched in 2016.

However you want to measure it, Sonos is a tiny company compared to the tech giants it regularly battles. The 19-year-old company only has products in the connected speaker market, and it has a $5 billion market cap. Its competitors—Google, Amazon, and Apple—are some of the world's biggest companies, each with a market cap above $1.5 trillion. To make matters more complicated for Sonos, the company relies on both Google and Amazon to do business in search, advertising, and retail sales, and it worried about retaliation from the two giants. Plus, once Amazon and Google entered the market, Sonos was forced to adopt support for both voice assistants in order to compete. Back in 2020, Sonos said Amazon also seemed to be using its technology, but it would focus its legal efforts on Google.

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upstart writes:

Ransomware gangs are working with Russian intelligence services, report says:

Russian intelligence services worked with prominent ransomware gangs to compromise U.S. government and government-affiliated organizations, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Analyst1.

Two Russian intelligence bureaus — the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR — collaborated with individuals in "multiple cybercriminal organizations," security analysts with the firm say in the report. The research indicates these cybercriminals helped Russian intelligence develop and deploy custom malware targeting American companies that serve U.S. military clients.

The hacking groups used a variation of the so-called Ryuk ransomware — used for attacks on large enterprises — called "Sidoh," created specifically for espionage, according to Analyst1. The code was launched sometime between June 2019 and January 2020 and hid in the background of Windows machines, silently harvesting keystrokes and sensitive documents.

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upstart writes:

Second IC :) – Sam Zeloof:

In 2018 I made the first homemade integrated circuits in my garage fab. I was a senior in high school when I made the Z1 amplifier, and now I'm a senior in college so there are some long overdue improvements to the amateur silicon process.

The Z1 had 6 transistors and was a great test chip to develop all the processes and equipment. The Z2 has 100 transistors on a 10µm polysilicon gate process – same technology as Intel's first processor. My chip is a simple 10×10 array of transistors to test, characterize, and tweak the process but this is a huge step closer to more advanced DIY computer chips. The Intel 4004 has 2,200 transistors and I've now made 1,200 on the same piece of silicon.

Previously, I made chips with a metal gate process. The aluminum gate has a large work function difference with the silicon channel beneath it which results in a high threshold voltage (10V). I used these metal gate transistors in a few fun projects like a guitar distortion pedal and a ring oscillator LED blinker but both of these required one or two 9V batteries to run the circuit due to high Vth. By switching to a polysilicon gate process, I get a ton of performance benefits (self aligned gate means lower overlap capacitances) including a much lower Vth which makes these chips compatible with 2.5V and 3.3V logic levels. The new FETs have excellent characteristics:

upstart writes:

T-Mobile apparently lied to government to get Sprint merger approval, ruling says:

T-Mobile apparently lied to government regulators about its 3G shutdown plans in order to win approval of its merger with Sprint, according to a ruling in a proceeding in front of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The ruling issued Friday ordered T-Mobile "to show cause why it should not be sanctioned by the commission for violating" a CPUC rule with "false, misleading, or omitted statements."

T-Mobile won approval for its 2020 acquisition of Sprint in part by agreeing to sell Sprint's Boost Mobile prepaid business and other assets to Dish, which is building its own 5G network and reselling capacity from other networks. T-Mobile agreed to make its 4G LTE and 3G CDMA networks available to Dish customers during a three-year transition period from 2020 to 2023, the CPUC ruling said. But T-Mobile now plans to stop providing CDMA network services nationwide on January 1, 2022, and Dish has urged government regulators to force T-Mobile to live up to its commitments.

T-Mobile's false and misleading statements under oath indicated, among other things, that T-Mobile would make its CDMA network "available to Boost customers until they were migrated to Dish Network Corporation's LTE or 5G services" and that Dish would have up to three years to complete the migration, the ruling said.

The CPUC can impose penalties against T-Mobile of up to $100,000 for each offense.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64

Along with the usual suspects, I've been trying to clear out the list of things that needed to get done in order to reach the standard of excellence demanded from a Slackware release, and I think we've gotten it pretty close. GCC was bumped to version 11.2.0 (because we just can't send this out 2 versions behind), and everything was verified to build properly or fixed up so that it did. I don't see any benefit to another public mass rebuild, so we're not going to do one. Anyway, without further ado, here is Slackware 15.0 release candidate one. Consider most things frozen and the focus now to be any remaining blocker bugs. We'll more than likely take that next Plasma bugfix release, but it's soon time to get off this treadmill. Enjoy! :-)

Follow the link for a huge list of changes in this release candidate.

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TheMightyChickadee writes:

Ripples in Saturn's Rings Reveal Planet's Core Is Big and Jiggly:

A team of astrophysicists looking at data from the Cassini spacecraft's tour of Saturn have estimated a new size for the planet's core. Studying gravitational effects on the icy rings, the team determined that Saturn's core is a combination of ice, rock, hydrogen, and helium about 50 times as massive as Earth, making it much more diffuse than previously thought.

"The conventional picture has it that Saturn's interior has a neat division between a compact core of rocks and ices and an envelope of mostly hydrogen and helium. We found that contrary to this conventional picture, the core is actually 'fuzzy': all those same rocks and ices are there, but they are effectively blurred out over a huge fraction of the planet," said Christopher Mankovich, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of a paper on the findings, published today in Nature Astronomy.

[...] The rocks and ice inside Saturn slowly give way to the more gassy parts of the planet as you move away from the core, he said. The team found that the core didn't have a clear-cut end point; rather, it had a transition region that made up about 60% of Saturn's entire diameter, making the core a huge part of the planet's total size and much larger part than the 10% to 20% of a planet's diameter that a more compact core would be.

takyon writes:

Intel Xe-HPG will be officially christened Intel Arc, DG2 Arc codenamed Alchemist to offer hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI-based super sampling

It is well-known by now that Intel is working on its own GPU architecture for gaming and content creation. The upcoming Xe-HPG DG2 GPU has so far been speculated to be competitive against the likes of at least mid-range Nvidia Ampere and AMD Navi 2x cards. Now, Intel is officially naming the Xe-HPG family as Intel Arc.

According to Intel, Arc spans hardware, software, and services. Arc will also encompass several GPU generations. The first generation, known as DG2, will be codenamed Alchemist. Alchemist is set to officially be available in Q1 2022. Intel also revealed the codenames of successive Arc generations viz. Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid.

Nvidia and AMD also plan to launch new generations of GPUs sometime in 2022.

Also at Phoronix, Videocardz, and Wccftech.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

T-Mobile probes 'huge data breach' as hackers claim they have names & social security numbers of 100m customers

T-MOBILE is currently investigating claims of a massive customer data breach which hackers claim has affected 100 million users.

The data breach reportedly includes social security numbers, phone numbers, names, physical addresses, unique IMEI numbers, and driver's license information.

[...] The post didn't mention T-Mobile specifically, but when contact by VICE the seller claimed that the data had been lifted from T-Mobile Servers.

"T-Mobile USA. Full customer info," the seller told the outlet, adding that the information of 100 million customers had been compromised.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Daniel Aleksandersen has delved into RFC 8375 from 2018 and its guidance on home LANs. Specifically, it says that the deinitive answer is to use the domain home.arpa special purpose Top-Level Domain (spTLD).

Do not use undelegated domain names like .lan, .home, .homenet, .network, nor should you make up your own domain name. You can use a domain or a subdomain of a domain name you've bought from a domain registrar, however. This last option requires extra configuration of your router to work locally, and an advanced setup involving dynamic-domain names (DynDNS) to work over the internet.

If you use a made-up domain name, then DNS requests may go unfulfilled by your router and it can forward them to the global root servers. This creates needless overhead for the core internet infrastructure, and leaks information about your network (such as device names.) Web browsers and other software, including your router, should know not to do that with .local and .home.arpa domains.

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upstart writes:

Researchers take step toward next-generation brain-computer interface system:

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are emerging assistive devices that may one day help people with brain or spinal injuries to move or communicate. BCI systems depend on implantable sensors that record electrical signals in the brain and use those signals to drive external devices like computers or robotic prosthetics.

Most current BCI systems use one or two sensors to sample up to a few hundred neurons, but neuroscientists are interested in systems that are able to gather data from much larger groups of brain cells.

Now, a team of researchers has taken a key step toward a new concept for a future BCI system — one that employs a coordinated network of independent, wireless microscale neural sensors, each about the size of a grain of salt, to record and stimulate brain activity. The sensors, dubbed "neurograins," independently record the electrical pulses made by firing neurons and send the signals wirelessly to a central hub, which coordinates and processes the signals.

In a study published on August 12 in Nature Electronics, the research team demonstrated the use of nearly 50 such autonomous neurograins to record neural activity in a rodent.

The results, the researchers say, are a step toward a system that could one day enable the recording of brain signals in unprecedented detail, leading to new insights into how the brain works and new therapies for people with brain or spinal injuries.

Journal Reference:
Lee, Jihun, Leung, Vincent, Lee, Ah-Hyoung, et al. Neural recording and stimulation using wireless networks of microimplants, Nature Electronics (DOI: 10.1038/s41928-021-00631-8)

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upstart writes:

3D-printed concrete bridge doesn't need supports:

3D-printed concrete bridge doesn't need supports

Concrete is the most consumed material in the world, second only to water. The material is pervasive because it has many practical uses — from building homes to forging dams that protect from storm surges. Reinforced concrete, concrete with steel embedded in it, is a foundation for the infrastructure of many essential industries: education, healthcare, transportation, government, and more. It would be next to impossible to live without reinforced concrete.

But the 2.8 billion tonnes of CO2 concrete emits falls just behind the total emissions of China or the United States — the two countries with the most CO2 emissions, reports Yale Environment 360.

Emissions aside, concrete thwarts natural habitats, covers and chokes ecosystems, and heats cities. We produce more concrete every two years than the plastic made in the past 60 years. Planet Earth is becoming a concrete world. And the steel used for reinforcement and the cement that binds the concrete together are at the heart of the problem.

[...] A team from Zaha Hadid Architects, ETH Zurich, and the Block Research Group decided to remove the reinforcement to build their approximately 39×52 foot arched pedestrian bridge.

upstart writes:

Data signals third year of vast Brazil Amazon deforestation:

Preliminary government data released on Friday indicates annual deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon may have surpassed 10,000 square kilometers (3,861 square miles) for the third straight year, continuing a worrisome jump since President Jair Bolsonaro assumed office.

The area deforested from August to July – the 12-month period that is Brazil’s reference – was 8,793 square kilometers, just below last year’s record, according to daily alerts compiled by the National Institute for Space Research’s Deter monitoring system.

That data is considered a leading indicator for complete calculations released near year end from the more accurate system, Prodes. It uses at least four different satellites to capture images, addressing oversights in preliminary data caused by lower resolution and cloud cover.

[...] Before Bolsonaro’s term began in 2019, the Brazilian Amazon hadn’t recorded a single year with that much deforestation in over a decade and, between 2009 and 2018, the average was 6,500 square kilometers. The far-right president has encouraged development of the biome and dismissed global handwringing about its destruction as a plot to hold back the nation’s agribusiness. At the same time, his administration defanged environmental authorities and legislative measures to loosen land protections have advanced, emboldening land grabbers.

“In two and a half years, the Bolsonaro government has managed to provoke a situation of destruction and chaos in the environment,” Suely Araujo, a former president of the environmental regulator, Ibama, told The Associated Press. “A group of factors is delegitimizing enforcement. There is an anti-policy that has no way of going right.”

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Likes' and 'shares' teach people to express more outrage online:

Social media platforms like Twitter amplify expressions of moral outrage over time because users learn such language gets rewarded with an increased number of "likes" and "shares," a new Yale University study shows.

And these rewards had the greatest influence on users connected with politically moderate networks.

"Social media's incentives are changing the tone of our political conversations online," said Yale's William Brady, a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale Department of Psychology and first author of the study. He led the research with Molly Crockett, an associate professor of psychology at Yale.

The Yale team measured the expression of moral outrage on Twitter during real life controversial events and studied the behaviors of subjects in controlled experiments designed to test whether social media's algorithms, which reward users for posting popular content, encourage outrage expressions.

"This is the first evidence that some people learn to express more outrage over time because they are rewarded by the basic design of social media," Brady said.

Journal Reference:
William J. Brady, Killian McLoughlin, Tuan N. Doan, et al. How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe5641)

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/08/touted-clean-blue-hydrogen-may-be-worse-gas-or-coal:

"Blue" hydrogen – an energy source that involves a process for making hydrogen by using methane in natural gas – is being lauded by many as a clean, green energy to help reduce global warming. But Cornell and Stanford University researchers believe it may harm the climate more than burning fossil fuel.

The carbon footprint to create blue hydrogen is more than 20% greater than using either natural gas or coal directly for heat, or about 60% greater than using diesel oil for heat, according to new research published Aug. 12 in Energy Science & Engineering.

[...] Blue hydrogen starts with converting methane to hydrogen and carbon dioxide by using heat, steam and pressure[*], or gray hydrogen, but goes further to capture some of the carbon dioxide. Once the byproduct carbon dioxide and the other impurities are sequestered, it becomes blue hydrogen, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The process to make blue hydrogen takes a large amount of energy, according to the researchers, which is generally provided by burning more natural gas.

[...] An ecologically friendly "green" hydrogen does exist, but it remains a small sector and it has not been commercially realized. Green hydrogen is achieved when water goes through electrolysis (with electricity supplied by solar, wind or hydroelectric power) and the water is separated into hydrogen and oxygen.

[Said Professor Robert Howarth]: "The best hydrogen, the green hydrogen derived from electrolysis – if used wisely and efficiently – can be that path to a sustainable future. Blue hydrogen is totally different."

[*] See the Sabatier reaction on Wikipedia.

Journal Reference:
Robert W. Howarth, Mark Z. Jacobson. How green is blue hydrogen? [open], Energy Science & Engineering (DOI: 10.1002/ese3.956)

Original Submission