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upstart writes:

A brief overview of IBM's new 7 nm Telum mainframe CPU:

From the perspective of a traditional x86 computing enthusiast—or professional—mainframes are strange, archaic beasts. They're physically enormous, power-hungry, and expensive by comparison to more traditional data-center gear, generally offering less compute per rack at a higher cost.

This raises the question, "Why keep using mainframes, then?" Once you hand-wave the cynical answers that boil down to "because that's how we've always done it," the practical answers largely come down to reliability and consistency. As AnandTech's Ian Cutress points out in a speculative piece focused on the Telum's redesigned cache, "downtime of these [IBM Z] systems is measured in milliseconds per year." (If true, that's at least seven nines.)

IBM's own announcement of the Telum hints at just how different mainframe and commodity computing's priorities are. It casually describes Telum's memory interface as "capable of tolerating complete channel or DIMM failures, and designed to transparently recover data without impact to response time."

When you pull a DIMM from a live, running x86 server, that server does not "transparently recover data"—it simply crashes.

Telum is designed to be something of a one-chip-to-rule-them-all for mainframes, replacing a much more heterogeneous setup in earlier IBM mainframes.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Internet shutdowns by governments have 'proliferated at a truly alarming pace':

The number of government-led internet shutdowns has exploded over the last decade as states seek to stifle dissent and protest by limiting citizens' access to the web.

Nearly 850 intentional shutdowns have been recorded over the past 10 years by nonprofit Access Now's Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), and although the group acknowledges that data on incidents before 2016 is "patchy," some 768 of these shutdowns took place in the last five years. There were 213 shutdowns in 2019 alone, with this figure ticking down to 155 in 2020 as the world adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic (which delayed elections and led to lockdowns that kept populations at home more often). And already in the first five months of 2021 there have been 50 shutdowns across 21 countries.

"Since we began tracking government-initiated internet shutdowns, their use has proliferated at a truly alarming pace," Access Now's Felicia Anthonio, campaigner and #KeepItOn lead, said in a new report on the issue in The Current, a publication of Google's internet thinktank Jigsaw. "As governments across the globe learn this authoritarian tactic from each other, it has moved from the fringes to become a common method many authorities use to stifle opposition, quash free speech and muzzle expression."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Arm China appears to be fully independent of Arm

A recent Semianalysis article by Dylan Patel goes further claiming Arm China is now an independent company from Arm. [This is refuted - see below. --JR] It all started when SoftBank formed a joint venture where Arm Limited and the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors with the venture having the exclusive right to distribute Arm's IP within China. They lost control of the company that way, but it was probably due to regulations as this type of law is common in Asia, and for instance, CNX Software Limited is a Hong Kong company instead of a Thai company, as foreigners can own 49% of a company, except for some expensive and time-consuming options.

The joint venture recently gave a presentation to the where they had plans to rebrand, develop their own IP, and operate independently from Arm. This is easy to see why once we learn the rest of the story... With the "power of the seal", Allen Wu ousted executives that were loyal to Arm and kept them out of the building with hired security. Arm stopped providing IP to Arm China, and Cortex-A77 core is the latest Arm IP available to Arm China. Neoverse, Armv9, Cortex-A78, and all other recent IP have not been shared with the Chinese entity.

Labor Day:
In observance of Labor Day (a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the first Monday in September) I am hereby inviting the SoylentNews editorial staff to enjoy a three-day weekend — Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Stories will be scheduled and released on a weekend-story-spacing schedule. The holiday marks the unofficial end of summer and it often marked by parades, sales, cookouts, and the like.

These volunteers give selflessly of their spare time to try and make sure we keep the stories coming. Please join me in thanking them for their generous sacrifice of spare time and experience to keep those stories coming!

Tor:
(short for The Onion Router) is in the process of rolling out an updated protocol. ThIs update is NOT compatible with prior versions. SoylentNews has had support from the early days of the site (thanks to NCommander, IIRC). As nobody on staff has experience in this area, our support will cease at any time - the TOR site is saying October. It was laudable at the time. Unfortunately, its more recent use seems to have been primarily by spammers. As such, we could lose access to Tor at anytime as our network "neighbors" either upgrade or find themselves no longer "adjacent" to back-level versions like ours is. You can still access this site using TOR with our normal URL.

Sock Mods
We have been methodically identifying and shutting down sockpuppet accounts. These are NOT allowed. Attempts to bypass the will of the community by controlling multiple accounts is forbidden. One user, one account. Do NOT use another account (or accounts) to upmod one-or-more accounts that you control. If you do not like getting downmods, take a look at the comments you post. Sure, occasionally, someone might mis-moderate a comment by accident (heck, *I* have done it!) In our experience, such errors are generally rare and are frequently followed at some point by others, offsetting moderations.

Freeman writes:

Too much of a good thing: Mourning the slow death of the retail game store:

When I was a kid, buying video games was an incredibly stressful process. In the late '80s, I was too young to buy magazines to find out what games deserved my hard-earned pocket-money. So, in an experience all too familiar to many millennial gamers, I used my (poor) intuition to look at the box art to decide what to bring home.

[...] At the time, a console title cost something in the realm of $100 in today's dollars (or over €85-95), which made each game purchase an investment requiring long consideration and thoughtful planning. At that price, every game needed to last weeks, if not months, to justify the investment. Most games achieved this with the good old "Nintendo-hard" philosophy: Brutal challenges make a relative dearth of original content last longer.

upstart writes:

New food freezing concept improves quality, increases safety and cuts energy use:

"A complete change over to this new method of food freezing worldwide could cut energy use by as much as 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year while reducing the carbon emissions that go along with generating that power by 4.6 billion kg, the equivalent of removing roughly one million cars from roads," said ARS research food technologist Cristina Bilbao-Sainz. She is with the Healthy Processed Foods Research Unit, part of ARS's Western Regional Research Center (WRRC) in Albany.

"These savings could be achieved without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure, if food manufacturers adopt this concept," Bilbao-Sainz added.

The new freezing method, called isochoric freezing, works by storing foods in a sealed, rigid container -- typically made of hard plastic or metal -- completely filled with a liquid such as water. Unlike conventional freezing in which the food is exposed to the air and freezes solid at temperatures below 32 degrees F, isochoric freezing preserves food without turning it to solid ice.

As long as the food stays immersed in the liquid portion, it is protected from ice crystallization, which is the main threat to food quality.

[...] Another benefit of isochoric freezing is that it also kills microbial contaminants during processing.

Journal Reference:
Analysis of global energy savings in the frozen food industry made possible by transitioning from conventional isobaric freezing to isochoric freezing, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.111621)

Original Submission

LabRat writes:

From ScienceNews:

For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star. In turn, that object gobbled the star's core, causing it to explode and leave behind only a black hole.

[...] Piecing the data together, Dong and his colleagues think this is what happened: Long ago, a binary pair of stars were born orbiting each other; one died in a spectacular supernova and became either a neutron star or a black hole. As gravity brought the two objects closer together, the dead star actually entered the outer layers of its larger stellar sibling.

The compact object spiraled inside the still-living star for hundreds of years, eventually making its way down to and then eating its partner's core. During this time, the larger star shed huge amounts of gas and dust, forming a shell of material around the duo.

In the living star's center, gravitational forces and complex magnetic interactions from the dead star's munching launched enormous jets of energy — picked up as an X-ray flash in 2014 — as well as causing the larger star to explode. Debris from the detonation smashed with colossal speed into the surrounding shell of material, generating the optical and radio light.

While theorists have previously envisioned such a scenario, dubbed a merger-triggered core collapse supernova, this appears to represent the first direct observation of this phenomenon, Dong says.

Journal Referencess:
1) D. Dong et al. A transient radio source consistent with a merger-triggered core collapse supernova. Science. Vol. 373, September 3, 2021, p. 1125. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg6037
2) N. Ivanova, S. Justham, X. Chen, et al. Common envelope evolution: where we stand and... [open], The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review (DOI: 10.1007/s00159-013-0059-2)

Original Submission

t-3 writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-scandalous-history-of-the-last-rotor-cipher-machine

If you've never heard of the HX-63 until just now, don't feel bad. Most professional cryptographers have never heard of it. Yet it was so secure that its invention alarmed William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptanalysts ever and, in the early 1950s, the first chief cryptologist of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). After reading a 1957 Hagelin patent (more on that later), Friedman realized that the HX-63, then under development, was, if anything, more secure than the NSA's own KL-7, then considered unbreakable. During the Cold War, the NSA built thousands of KL-7s, which were used by every U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence agency from 1952 to 1968.

The reasons for Friedman's anxiety are easy enough to understand. The HX-63 had about 10⁶⁰⁰ possible key combinations; in modern terms, that's equivalent to a 2,000-bit binary key. For comparison, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is used today to protect sensitive information in government, banking, and many other sectors, typically uses a 128- or a 256-bit key.

Just as worrisome was that CAG was a privately owned Swiss company, selling to any government, business, or individual. At the NSA, Friedman's job was to ensure that the U.S. government had access to the sensitive, encrypted communications of all governments and threats worldwide. But traffic encrypted by the HX-63 would be unbreakable.

upstart writes:

The fungal mind: on the evidence for mushroom intelligence:

Mushrooms and other kinds of fungi are often associated with witchcraft and are the subjects of longstanding superstitions. Witches dance inside fairy rings of mushrooms according to German folklore, while a French fable warns that anyone foolish enough to step inside these 'sorcerer's rings' will be cursed by enormous toads with bulging eyes. These impressions come from the poisonous and psychoactive peculiarities of some species, as well as the overnight appearance of toadstool ring-formations.

Given the magical reputation of the fungi, claiming that they might be conscious is dangerous territory for a credentialled scientist. But in recent years, a body of remarkable experiments have shown that fungi operate as individuals, engage in decision-making, are capable of learning, and possess short-term memory. These findings highlight the spectacular sensitivity of such 'simple' organisms, and situate the human version of the mind within a spectrum of consciousness that might well span the entire natural world.

DannyB writes:

AI computers can't patent their own inventions — yet — a US judge rules

Should an artificially intelligent machine be able to patent its own inventions? For a US federal judge, the larger implications of that question were irrelevant. In April 2020, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled that only "natural persons" could be credited as the inventor of a patent, and a US court decided Thursday that yes, that's what the law technically says (via Bloomberg).

Not every country agrees with that direction. South Africa and Australia decided to go the other direction, granting one patent and reinstating a second patent application filed by AI researcher Steven Thaler, whose AI system DABUS reportedly came up with a flashing light and a new type of food container. Thaler is the one who sued the US in this case as well — he's part of a group called The Artificial Inventor Project that's lobbying for AI recognition around the globe.

On a patent application doesn't the inventor have to swear they invented it? [602.01 Naming the Inventor]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Prehistoric Climate Change Repeatedly Channelled Human Migrations Across Arabia:

New research shows that over the last 400,000 years, multiple pulses of increased rainfall transformed the generally arid Arabian Peninsula into a hospitable route for human population movements across Southwest Asia

International and Saudi researchers have discovered archaeological sites in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia associated with the remains of ancient lakes formed when periods of increased rainfall transformed the region into grassland. The researchers found that early humans spread into the region during each 'Green Arabia' phase, each bringing a different kind of material culture. The new research establishes northern Arabia as a crucial migration route and a crossroads for early humans.

Recent research in Arabia – a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and many other Saudi and international researchers – has begun to document the incredibly rich prehistory of Saudi Arabia, the largest country in Southwest Asia. Previous research in the region has focused on the coastal and woodland margins, while human prehistory in the vast interior areas remained poorly understood.

The new findings, including the oldest dated evidence for humans in Arabia at 400,000 years ago, are described as a "breakthrough in Arabian archaeology" by Dr Huw Groucutt, lead author of the study and head of the 'Extreme Events' Max Planck Society Research Group in Jena, Germany, based at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

Journal Reference:
Groucutt, Huw S., White, Tom S., Scerri, Eleanor M. L., et al. Multiple hominin dispersals into Southwest Asia over the past 400,000 years [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03863-y)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it used the trademarked word 'zeta':

On Tuesday, Tariq Rashid, a UK-based data scientist and author, tried to create a t-shirt design using on-demand print shop Spring to celebrate the Riemann zeta function, which is widely known among mathematicians and technical types.

"I thought I'd create a t-shirt of the function as it looks cool and is pretty famous," Rashid told The Register. "The Clay Math Institute has a $100m prize for solving the Riemann Hypothesis."

Rashid uploaded his design to Spring, formerly known as Teespring, so that it could be printed to order by netizens. The biz had other ideas. It removed Rashid's design from its store listings because his item included the trademarked word "zeta" in its blurb.

When Rashid emailed Spring to object that zeta is a common mathematical term, the company's legal team replied: "We completely understand your concerns about our keyword block. As you are aware, Zeta is a letter of the Greek Alphabet. The Greek alphabet is currently protected legally by the Affinity Client Services. Due to this ownership and the takedowns we have received, we must police our platform for content using 'Zeta.'"

The legal eagles later said it had reviewed Rashid's content and "placed it back into active status because it does not violate current ownership." That said, that particular listing was not made publicly available again as we'll explain later.

Affinity Consultants, based in Carlsbad, California, for more than two decades has been coordinating trademark licensing oversight for various Greek-lettered organizations – fraternities and sororities – that use combinations of Greek letters to identify themselves. [...]

Original Submission

FAA Grounds SpaceShipTwo After Problem on July Flight - SpaceNews

upstart writes:

FAA grounds SpaceShipTwo after problem on July flight - SpaceNews:

LOMPOC, Calif. — The Federal Aviation Administration will not allow Virgin Galactic to resume flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane until it completes an investigation into a problem on the vehicle's previous flight in July.

In a Sept. 2 statement, the FAA said it is overseeing a Virgin Galactic mishap investigation into the July 11 flight of SpaceShipTwo, called "Unity 22" by the company, which appeared to go as planned but in fact suffered a problem that caused it to stray from its restricted airspace.

"Virgin Galactic may not return the SpaceShipTwo vehicle to flight until the FAA approves the final mishap investigation report or determines the issues related to the mishap do not affect public safety," the agency stated.

The statement came a day after the publication of an article by The New Yorker that revealed that the two SpaceShipTwo pilots ignored an "entry glide cone warning" during the July 11 flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The flight took them and four others on board, including Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, to the edge of space and back with no indication at the time of any problems.

DannyB writes:

On Mars, NASA's Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For

After a perplexing failure last month, NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, was able to successfully collect a sample of rock on Wednesday. The rover took pictures of the rock in the tube and sent the images to Earth so that mission managers could be sure they had not come up empty again. The rock was there.

Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer for the rover, enthused on Twitter on Thursday morning, describing it as “one beautifully perfect cored sample.”

Now that is one beautifully perfect cored sample, if I do say so myself! Be patient, little sample, your journey is about to begin. #SamplingMarshttps://t.co/jOtNGKjeAe

— Adam Steltzner (@steltzner) September 2, 2021

[...] Late in the day on Thursday, NASA said in a news release that the mission team remained confident the rock was still in the collection tube, hidden in shadows. It would be surprising if the shaking could have caused the rock to jump up and out of the tube. But NASA said the rover would take more pictures when the lighting was better before sealing the tube and putting it away in its belly.

BBC: Perseverance: Nasa's Mars rover makes second drill sample bid

The rover is tasked with gathering more than two dozen cores over the next year or so that will be fetched home by a joint US and European effort later this decade.

[....] The deep, 45km-wide depression, some 20 degrees north of the planet's equator, looks to have held a lake billions of years ago.

Because of this, scientists think Jezero's sediments may hold traces of ancient microbial life - assuming biology ever took hold on Mars.

Now scientists have to wait and see which happens first: return of rock samples to Earth, or SLS launch.

Original Submission

LabRat writes:

DentalSlim weight-loss device literally locks your mouth shut:

UK and University of Otago researchers have presented a "world-first weight loss device," which attaches to the teeth and prevents patients from opening their mouths wider than 2 mm using "magnetic devices and custom-manufactured locking bolts."

The researchers say this medieval-sounding machine, which is fixed to the first molars with orthodontic cement by a dentist, doesn't restrict breathing or speech, but holds people to a liquid diet.

In a study published in the British Dental Journal, seven healthy, obese participants wore the devices for 14 days. They were given a commercially-available liquid diet to follow, giving them 1,200 kcal of energy per day. The mean weight loss over this period was 6.36 kg (14 lb).

[Insert obvious joke about politicians needing this here.]

Journal Reference:
Paul A. Brunton, Jithendra Ratnayake, H. Jonathan Bodansky, et al. An intraoral device for weight loss: initial clinical findings [open], British Dental Journal (DOI: 10.1038/s41415-021-3081-1)

Original Submission