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canopic jug writes:

The Telegraph reports that Raspberry Pi Trading has offloaded stakes to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust in a move that values the operation at around $500m. Most manufacturing is able to be done in the UK, and last year's sales amounted to 7.1m units for a profit of £11.4m.

Lansdowne Partners' presence in the list of investors is less surprising than Ezrah Charitable Trust. The latter was founded by former Goldman Sachs vice-president and Farallon Capital Management partner David Cohen in 2016 to focus "on the poorest of the poor, especially in Africa" – an indicator that it may be the work of the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation that was of interest.

The Register mentions that the foundation's 2020 financials show an income of over £95.8m, up nearly double from the £49.5m it reported in 2019.

Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, and so on. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.

Previously:
(2021) Two New Microcontroller Boards Released with Built In Displays
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2020) Raspberry Pi 4 Gets 8 GB RAM Model, Also 64-bit OS and USB Boot (Both in Beta)
and more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Criminal Charges Coming For MAX Chief Technical Pilot:

Boeing’s former chief technical pilot on the 737 MAX is expected to be indicted on criminal charges in the next few days. The Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday that Mark Forkner, who left Boeing about two years ago, is expected to be indicted in the next few days to face allegations that he misled FAA officials on the significance of the addition of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to the MAX.  MCAS, which adjusts the angle of the horizontal stabilizer to change the pitch of the aircraft, was installed to compensate for aerodynamic differences between the MAX and earlier generation 737s. It was designed to operate in the background without pilot input and was cited in two fatal crashes involving the MAX.

According to the Seattle Times, part of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement between Boeing and the FAA called out Forkner and his deputy chief pilot for allegedly misrepresenting the significance of the addition of the MCAS while exonerating senior brass. The Times says Forkner will likely argue that he was under intense pressure from above to convince the FAA that the MAX was so similar to the earlier 737s that minimal type training would be required, thus saving potential customers millions in training costs. In the two crashes, MCAS overpowered flight crews after getting erroneous data from angle of attack indicators and put the aircraft, one operated by Lion Air and the second by Ethiopian Airlines, into unrecoverable high-speed dives.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

World’s largest chip foundry TSMC sets 2050 deadline to go carbon neutral:

The dirty secret of the computing and networking world is that most of its pollution comes not from the electricity used to run the devices, but from the energy and materials used to produce the chips that make it all possible.

In a typical laptop like a MacBook Air, manufacturing represents 74 percent of the device’s lifetime carbon emissions, including shipping, use, and disposal. Of that, about half is from integrated circuits, according to a recent study led by researchers at Harvard. Researchers have found similar trends throughout the industry. “Chip manufacturing, as opposed to hardware use and energy consumption, accounts for most of the carbon output attributable to hardware systems,” the study’s authors said.

That footprint may wane in the coming years, though, as TSMC announced last week that it would flatten its emissions growth by 2025 and reach net-zero carbon by 2050. That’ll be a tall order for a company that produced over 15 million tons of carbon pollution last year across the entire scope of its operations, about the same as the country of Ghana. Though the amount of carbon pollution per wafer produced by TSMC has declined in recent years, surging demand for semiconductors has driven overall emissions up, and years of rising energy use, likely from the introduction of EUV lithography, has slowed progress.

upstart writes:

Tesla Ends Its Referral Program For Everything Except Solar Roof:

Tesla has now officially ended its referral program for its vehicles and everything else except its solar roof.

We expect a new version of the program to launch in the near future.

For years, Tesla relied on its referral program to boost demand.

The automaker doesn’t like to spend on marketing or advertising and instead, it relied on its userbase to promote its vehicles and rewarded them in the process.

[...] At the peak of the program, Tesla was giving away free new Roadsters to owners who accumulated enough referrals.

An impressive number of people ended up reaching that level, and we estimated that Tesla would be giving away about 80 new Roadsters on top of giving out significant discounts to many more.

owl writes:

If Aliens Are Out There, We’ll Meet Them in a Few Hundred Million Years:

Seventy years ago, Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues a question during a lunchtime conversation. If life is common in our Universe, why can’t we see any evidence of its activity out there (aka. “where is everybody?”) Seventy years later, this question has launched just as many proposed resolutions as to how extraterrestrial intelligence (ETIs) could be common, yet go unnoticed by our instruments.

Some possibilities that have been considered are that humanity might be alone in the Universe, early to the party, or is not in a position to notice any yet. But in a recent study, Robin Hanson (creator of the Great Filter) and an interdisciplinary team offer a new model for determining when the aliens will get here. According to their study, humanity is early to the Universe and will meet others in 200 million to 2 billion years from now.

[...] Another positive takeaway from this research is the fact that this sort of modeling is now possible. Whereas early SETI efforts were guided by conjectures that were subject to a lot of uncertainty (like the Drake Equation), we now have enough data on the types of stars and exoplanets in our Universe that we can make educated inferences.

“It’s exciting that we’re here now,” said Hanson. “We’re no longer speculating about aliens; we are reasonably sure they exist, and we can say where they are in spacetime. We have a simple statistical model that says where they are, what they are doing, and where we might see or meet them.”

Visualization on Youtube: "The Grabby Aliens Model".

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China to stop building coal plants in developing nations:

Chinese President Xi Jinping used his speech to the United Nations General Assembly to announce a major new step towards controlling global emissions. After reiterating his own country's climate pledges, Xi said that China would start making it easier for other countries to keep emissions in check: new support for renewable energy projects and an end to construction of coal plants.

[...] China had already committed to having its emissions peak at the end of this decade and to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. But until this point, its development banks were continuing to finance coal plants, and its companies would often construct them. In a recorded speech played at the UN today, however, Xi indicated that this would stop: "China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad."

That was the full extent of his words on the topic, however, so that leaves out plenty of details regarding the timing and extent of the halt. The most critical issue will be how far along projects will have to be before they're allowed to continue.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Twitter will pay over $800 million t​o settle a class action suit:

Twitter has agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a class action suit filed by shareholders in 2016. Investors alleged that Twitter masked the company's slowing growth while executives including former CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey (the current CEO) sold stock “for hundreds of millions of dollars in insider profits.”

The plaintiffs said Twitter was tracking daily active users (DAU) as the key metric for engagement in early 2015, but it was still reporting monthly active user figures. The DAU measurement indicated engagement was dropping or staying flat, according to the lawsuit.

[...] The company plans to use cash on hand for the settlement. It's expected to pay the sum by the end of the year.

Proposed settlement.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New "Elon Musk Club" crypto giveaway scam promoted via email:

A new Elon Musk-themed cryptocurrency giveaway scam called the "Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund" or "Elon Musk Club" is being promoted through spam email campaigns that started over the past few weeks.

[...] Just last week, someone sent three bitcoin, or $150,074 at the time, to a known crypto giveaway scam.

[...] While most cryptocurrency scams target social media users, scammers now use email spam to promote a new "Elon Musk Club" or "Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund" giveaway.

The phishing emails themselves are low effort and include strange non-descriptive subjects and messages. However, they include an HTML attachment named simply 'Get Free Bitcoin - [id].htm' or "Elon Musk Club - [id].htm," as shown below.

[...] These HTML attachments contain a single line of code that uses JavaScript to redirect the browser to the https://msto.me/elonmusk/ webpage.

[...] So far, BleepingComputer has seen two bitcoin addresses associated with these scams:

• 32hU2JrkmMmgmka2rUuKXc3yd3S9WKxWnp received 73 transactions of 0.05734407 bitcoins, worth approximately $2,731.98.
• 3EbUB9wdQCxJwW5neH3xnTGjuoCA8THU5D received 23 transactions of 0.01953376, worth approximately $930.99.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Facebook’s latest “apology” reveals security and safety disarray:

Facebook had it rough last week. Leaked documents—many leaked documents—formed the backbone of a string of reports published in The Wall Street Journal. Together, the stories paint the picture of a company barely in control of its own creation. The revelations run the gamut: Facebook had created special rules for VIPs that largely exempted 5.8 million users from moderation, forced troll farm content on 40 percent of America, created toxic conditions for teen girls, ignored cartels and human traffickers, and even undermined CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own desire to promote vaccination against COVID.

Now, Facebook wants you to know it’s sorry and that it’s trying to do better.

“In the past, we didn’t address safety and security challenges early enough in the product development process,” the company said in an unsigned press release today. “Instead, we made improvements reactively in response to a specific abuse. But we have fundamentally changed that approach.”

Previously:
Facebook Documents Show How Toxic Instagram is for Teens, Wall Street Journal Reports
Leaked Documents Reveal the Special Rules Facebook Uses for 5.8M VIPs
Facebook is a Hub of Sex Trafficking Recruitment in the US, Report Says
Instagram is "Most Invasive App", New Study Shows

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://science-news.co/a-new-model-for-a-real-warp-drive-that-doesnt-break-the-laws-of-physics/

In science fiction literature a warp drive is a technology that allows travel faster than the speed of light by warping space-time to beat the speed of light barrier. This is also not entirely impossible in reality. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says you can’t accelerate objects from below to above the speed of light, because that would take an infinite amount of energy, however this restriction only applies to objects in space-time not to space-time itself. Space-time can bend expand or warp at any speed and even physicists think, that the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. So on the spectrum from fiction to science, warp drives are on the more scientific end.

Recently two researchers at Applied Physics have created a new model for a warp drive. They describe it as a model for a space craft that could travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. The researchers Alexey Bobrick, and Gianni Martire say, that this is the first general model for a real warp drive.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

New Zealand police arrest pair trying to enter Auckland with ‘large amount’ of KFC:

The men were arrested after allegedly trying to flee from police near the Auckland border. When their car was searched, police said they found a large quantity of KFC, as well as the cash and a number of empty ounce bags.

The arrest struck a chord with New Zealanders – especially Aucklanders, who have spent a month in a strict level four lockdown that does not allow restaurants to open or residents to order takeaway food.

[...] After the KFC arrest, a police spokesperson said “officers noticed a suspicious looking vehicle travelling on a gravel road, and upon seeing the police car, the vehicle did a U-turn and sped off trying to evade police.

[...] A breach of the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act can result in imprisonment for up to six months; or a fine of up to $4,000.

The men will appear in court for breaching the health order, and police said further charges were likely.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A new way to solve the ‘hardest of the hard’ computer problems:

A relatively new type of computing that mimics the way the human brain works was already transforming how scientists could tackle some of the most difficult information processing problems.

Now, researchers have found a way to make what is called reservoir computing work between 33 and a million times faster, with significantly fewer computing resources and less data input needed.

In fact, in one test of this next-generation reservoir computing, researchers solved a complex computing problem in less than a second on a desktop computer.

Using the now current state-of-the-art technology, the same problem requires a supercomputer to solve and still takes much longer, said Daniel Gauthier, lead author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University.

[...] Reservoir computing is a machine learning algorithm developed in the early 2000s and used to solve the "hardest of the hard" computing problems, such as forecasting the evolution of dynamical systems that change over time, Gauthier said.

upstart writes:

Alleged Scammers Charged With Using Stolen Ids To Trick Delivery Apps - The Verge:

The Justice Department has charged over a dozen people with running a scam on ride hailing and delivery apps. Prosecutors say the alleged scam ring created fake accounts using stolen personal information, then sold those accounts to otherwise unqualified drivers — while also collecting referral bonuses and building software to trick the apps.

The indictment was revealed on Friday and adds to wire fraud claims first revealed in May. It accuses 14 people — all Brazilian nationals and most living in Massachusetts — with identity theft against five unnamed companies. (Prosecutors filed the wire fraud charges against 19 people in total, and 16 have been arrested.) The wire fraud charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, while the aggravated identity theft charges carry a sentence of at least 2 years.

[...] From around January of 2019 to April of 2021, the group’s members allegedly told customers (falsely) that they needed to scan their driver’s licenses when delivering alcohol. Prosecutors say defendants altered the photos on the licenses, paired them with other personal information, and started accounts that they could sell or rent to drivers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New Research Shows Regular Exercise May Lower Risk of Developing Anxiety by Almost 60%:

Anxiety disorders – which typically develop early in a person’s life – are estimated to affect approximately 10% of the world’s population and have been found to be twice as common in women compared to men.

And while exercise is put forward as a promising strategy for the treatment of anxiety, little is known about the impact of exercise dose, intensity or physical fitness level on the risk of developing anxiety disorders.

To help answer this question, researchers in Sweden recently published a study in Frontiers in Psychiatry to show that those who took part in the world’s largest long-distance cross-country ski race (Vasaloppet) between 1989 and 2010 had a “significantly lower risk” of developing anxiety compared to non-skiers during the same period.

The study is based on data from almost 400,000 people in one of the largest ever population-wide epidemiology studies across both sexes.

[...] “We found that the group with a more physically active lifestyle had an almost 60% lower risk of developing anxiety disorders over a follow-up period of up to 21 years,” said first author of the paper, Martine Svensson, and her colleague and principal investigator, Tomas Deierborg, of the Department of Experimental Medical Science at Lund University, Sweden.

upstart writes:

Engineers create 3D-printed objects that sense how a user is interacting with them:

MIT researchers have developed a new method to 3D print mechanisms that detect how force is being applied to an object. The structures are made from a single piece of material, so they can be rapidly prototyped. A designer could use this method to 3D print “interactive input devices,” like a joystick, switch, or handheld controller, in one go.

To accomplish this, the researchers integrated electrodes into structures made from metamaterials, which are materials divided into a grid of repeating cells. They also created editing software that helps users build these interactive devices.

“Metamaterials can support different mechanical functionalities. But if we create a metamaterial door handle, can we also know that the door handle is being rotated, and if so, by how many degrees? If you have special sensing requirements, our work enables you to customize a mechanism to meet your needs,” says co-lead author Jun Gong, a former visiting PhD student at MIT who is now a research scientist at Apple.

[...] “What I find most exciting about the project is the capability to integrate sensing directly into the material structure of objects. This will enable new intelligent environments in which our objects can sense each interaction with them,” [co-author Stefanie] Mueller says. “For instance, a chair or couch made from our smart material could detect the user’s body when the user sits on it and either use it to query particular functions (such as turning on the light or TV) or to collect data for later analysis (such as detecting and correcting body posture).”