SoylentNews

upstart writes:

NASA’s Lucy mission will soon be in the sky, with a launch set for Saturday:

Less than five years have gone by since NASA selected the "Lucy" mission for development as part of its Discovery Mission program, and now the intriguing spacecraft is ready for launch.

The $981 million mission will fly an extremely complex trajectory over the span of a dozen years. The spacecraft will swing by Earth a total of three times for gravitational assists as it visits a main-belt asteroid, 52246 Donaldjohanson, and subsequently flies by eight Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun.

The Lucy mission is scheduled to launch on Saturday at 5:34 am ET (09:34 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. An Atlas V rocket carrying the 1.5-ton spacecraft rolled to the launch pad on Thursday in advance of the launch attempt. The weather looks fine Saturday morning, with a 90 percent chance of favorable conditions. The launch will be covered live on NASA TV.

takyon writes:

Microsoft shutting down LinkedIn in China:

Microsoft is shutting down its social network, LinkedIn, in China, saying having to comply with the Chinese state has become increasingly challenging.

It comes after the career-networking site faced questions for blocking the profiles of some journalists.

LinkedIn will launch a jobs-only version of the site, called InJobs, later this year.

But this will not include a social feed or the ability to share or post articles.

LinkedIn senior vice-president Mohak Shroff blogged: "We're facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China."

And the firm said in a statement: "While we are going to sunset the localised version of LinkedIn in China later this year, we will continue to have a strong presence in China to drive our new strategy and are excited to launch the new InJobs app later this year."

Also at CNBC:

LinkedIn was the last major U.S. social network still operating in China.

See also: Here's the Biggest Loser From LinkedIn's China Departure

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused Waymo Cars Trying To Turn Around 'Every 5 Minutes':

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — A normally quiet neighborhood in San Francisco is buzzing about a sudden explosion of traffic. Neighbors say their Richmond District dead-end street has suddenly become crowded with Waymo vehicles.

[...] They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there’s nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in. Not long after that car is gone, there will be another, which will make the same turn and leave, before another car shows up and does the exact same thing. And while there are some pauses, it never really stops.

“There are some days where it can be up to 50,” [resident Jennifer] King says of the Waymo count. “It’s literally every five minutes. And we’re all working from home, so this is what we hear.”

At several points this Tuesday, they showed up on top of each other. The cars, packed with technology, stop in a queue as if they are completely baffled by the dead end. While some neighbors say it is becoming a bit of a nuisance, everyone finds it a little bizarre.

[...] In an emailed statement, a Waymo spokesperson said, “We continually adjust to dynamic San Francisco road rules. In this case, cars traveling North of California on 15th Ave have to take a u-turn due to the presence of Slow Streets signage on Lake. So, the Waymo Driver was obeying the same road rules that any car is required to follow.”

Original Submission

upstart writes:

British Medical Journal: Daily Use of CBD Oil May Be Linked to Lung Cancer Regression:

It may be worth exploring further the use of cannabidiol ('CBD') oil as a potential lung cancer treatment, suggest doctors in BMJ Case Reports after dealing with a daily user whose lung tumor shrank without the aid of conventional treatment. The body's own endocannabinoids are involved in various processes, including nerve function, emotion, energy metabolism, pain and inflammation, sleep and immune function.

[...] The report authors describe the case of a woman in her 80s, diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. She also had mild chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), osteoarthritis, and high blood pressure, for which she was taking various drugs. She was a smoker, getting through around a pack plus of cigarettes every week (68 packs/year).

Her tumor was 41 mm in size at diagnosis, with no evidence of local or further spread, so she was suitable for conventional treatment of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. But the woman refused treatment, so was placed under 'watch and wait' monitoring, which included regular CT scans every 3-6 months.

These showed that the tumor was progressively shrinking, reducing in size from 41 mm in June 2018 to 10 mm by February 2021, equal to an overall 76% reduction in maximum diameter, averaging 2.4% a month, say the report authors.

When contacted in 2019 to discuss her progress, the woman revealed that she had been taking CBD oil as an alternative self-treatment for her lung cancer since August 2018, shortly after her original diagnosis.

upstart writes:

Photon-Phonon Breakthrough: A New Way To Combine Two Different States of Matter:

New research by a City College of New York team has uncovered a novel way to combine two different states of matter. For one of the first times, topological photons—light—has been combined with lattice vibrations, also known as phonons, to manipulate their propagation in a robust and controllable way.

The study utilized topological photonics, an emergent direction in photonics which leverages fundamental ideas of the mathematical field of topology about conserved quantities—topological invariants—that remain constant when altering parts of a geometric object under continuous deformations. One of the simplest examples of such invariants is number of holes, which, for instance, makes donut and mug equivalent from the topological point of view. The topological properties endow photons with helicity, when photons spin as they propagate, leading to unique and unexpected characteristics, such as robustness to defects and unidirectional propagation along interfaces between topologically distinct materials. Thanks to interactions with vibrations in crystals, these helical photons can then be used to channel infrared light along with vibrations.

The implications of this work are broad, in particular allowing researchers to advance Raman spectroscopy, which is used to determine vibrational modes of molecules. The research also holds promise for vibrational spectroscopy—also known as infrared spectroscopy—which measures the interaction of infrared radiation with matter through absorption, emission, or reflection. This can then be utilized to study and identify and characterize chemical substances.

Reference: "Topological phonon-polariton funneling in midinfrared metasurfaces" by S. Guddala, F. Komissarenko, S. Kiriushechkina, A. Vakulenko, M. Li, V. M. Menon, A. Alù and A. B. Khanikaev, 8 October 2021, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj5488

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Rickroll Grad Prank Exposes Exterity IPTV Bug:

When Township High School District 214 in Illinois got rickrolled all at once across its six different schools just before graduation, it was more than a meticulously executed senior prank.

Cybersecurity star-in-the-making and recent high-school graduate Minh Duong found, and was able to exploit, a zero-day bug in the district's Exterity IPTV system. The goof was received in good humor by school administrators, luckily for Minh and his cohorts, and the bug was reported to Exterity.

But so far, the company hasn't responded to Minh's disclosure or said anything about possible mitigations, he said.

"If I don't end up hearing back from them in my next few attempts at contact, I will publish the exploit that I used," he told Threatpost. "CVE-2021-42109 has been reserved for the Exterity IPTV privesc vulnerabilities, with my blog post being listed as a reference."

"The Big Rick," as the prank was called, came off beautifully — hijacking every TV, projector and monitor on the district's IPTV system to play Rick Astley's classic video for "Never Gonna Give You Up."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/chimaera-release-announce-2021-10-14

Dear Friends and Software Freedom Lovers,

Devuan Developers are pleased to announce the release of Devuan Chimaera
4.0 as the project's newest stable release. This is the result of lots of
painstaking work by the team and extensive testing by the wider Devuan
community.

What's new in Chimaera 4.0?

        * Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10.
        * Your choice of init: sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC.
        * Improved desktop support - virtually all desktop environments available
            in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd-free.
        * New boot, display manager and desktop theming.
        * Enhanced accessibility: installation via GUI or console can now be
            accomplished via software or hardware speech synthesis, or using a
            refreshable braille display, and Devuan Chimaera has the ability to
            install desktop environments without PulseAudio, allowing speech
            synthesis in both console and GUI sessions at the same time.

"without PulseAudio", eh? Speculations on the reason for that are welcome, he asked them knowingly... -- Ed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

iPhone apps no better for privacy than Android, Oxford study finds:

"Overall, we find that neither platform is clearly better than the other for privacy across the dimensions we studied," say the academic paper entitled "Are iPhones Really Better for Privacy?" and presented by researchers from the University of Oxford.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because an Irish team earlier this year came to similar conclusions about the privacy of the Android and iOS core operating systems, apps notwithstanding. Meanwhile, an American researcher in 2020 found that the security of iOS apps was roughly equal to that of Android apps.

[...] The researchers analyzed the code, permissions and network traffic of 12,000 randomly selected free apps from each platform that had been updated or released in 2018 or later. Each app was run on a real device, either a first-generation iPhone SE running iOS 14.2 or a Google Nexus 5 running Android 7 Nougat.

They found that nearly all (89%) of the Android apps contained at least one tracking library, which was almost always Google Play Services. The numbers weren't much lower on iOS, where 79% of apps had at least one tracking library, most likely Apple's own SKADNetwork, which tracks which ads a user clicks on.

upstart writes:

Analysis | China’s Power Crisis Will Affect Industries Worldwide:

A villain is emerging in China’s efforts to rein in its energy prices: inefficient, power-hungry industry.

With flooding in the coal hub of Shanxi province driving prices up to 1,508 yuan ($234) a metric ton even as the government tries to kickstart extra production, further measures are clearly needed to prevent more generators cutting off their turbines and causing blackouts through the cold of northern China’s winter. That means a crackdown on the factories that still consume the lion’s share of electricity.

Industry makes up only 25% of grid demand in the U.S., but in China it’s fully 59% of the total — more than all the country’s homes, offices and retail stores put together. Cheap power has been an essential tool of development, and the government has traditionally encouraged major users with electricity tariffs that get cheaper the more you consume. With about two-thirds of the grid powered by coal, the cost of digging up the black stuff has determined how much industrial users pay for their power.

The problem is that coal isn’t getting any cheaper. After a sustained period of deflation prior to 2016, when a glut of dangerous and unregulated mines was closed down, annualized costs jumped 40% in 2017. They didn’t really fall again until Covid-19 struck, and they’ve since rebounded with a 57% increase from 12 months ago in August.

Such increases might be tolerable if end-users were turning this power into high-value goods — but all too often, that’s not the case. China now consumes more electricity per capita than the U.K. and Italy, but comes nowhere close in terms of economic output. Determined to hit President Xi Jinping’s targets on peaking emissions by 2030 and hitting net zero by 2060, Beijing’s policy makers have fixed on so-called “dual high” sectors — those whose energy consumption and carbon emissions are both elevated — as the culprits. These are many of the industries that have grown fastest in recent decades, such as cement, steel, base metals, oil refining, chemicals, and glass. They collectively account for more than half of China’s emissions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanet:

Lead author Juan Sanchez and a team of scientists analyzed the spectrum of asteroid 1986 DA, a member of a rare class of metal-rich, near-Earth asteroids. They found the surface of this particular space rock to be 85% metallic, likely including iron, nickel, cobalt, copper, gold, and platinum group metals prized for industrial uses, from cars to electronics.

With the exception of gold and copper, they estimate the mass of these metals would exceed their global reserves on Earth—in some cases by an order of magnitude (or more).

The team also put a dollar figure on the asteroid’s economic value.

If mined and marketed over a period of 50 years, 1986 DA’s precious metals would bring in some $233 billion a year for a total haul of $11.65 trillion. (That takes into account the deflationary effect the flood of new supply would have on the market.) It probably wouldn’t make sense to bring home metals like iron, nickel, and cobalt, which are common on Earth, but they could be used to build infrastructure in orbit and on the moon and Mars.

owl writes:

Charter Spectrum Threatens To Ruin Potential Customers Over Debt They Don't Owe:

There's a reason U.S. cable and broadband companies have some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any companies, in any industry in America. The one/two punch of lagging broadband competition and captured regulators generally mean there's little to no meaningful penalty for overcharging users, providing lackluster services and support, and generally just being an obnoxious ass.

Case in point: a new Charter (which operates under the Spectrum brand) marketing effort apparently involves threatening to ruin the credit scores of ex-customers unless they re-subscribe to the company's services. It basically begins with a letter that threatens ex-users that they'll be reported to debt collectors unless they sign up for service. It proceeds to inform them the letter is a "one-time courtesy" allowing them to sign up for cable or broadband service before the debt collector comes calling:

"A well-established credit history will more likely allow you to qualify for lower mortgage rates, better chances for obtaining credit cards and approvals for home rentals,” the letter says, suggesting that Schklair’s finances could be in serious trouble unless he returns to the Spectrum fold. "You have worked hard to build a great future for yourself and your family,” it says. “We look forward to welcoming you back.”

Maybe it’s just me, but that has a Sopranos-like ring of “You’ve made a nice life for yourself. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

[...]

"A Spectrum spokesperson confirmed the letter’s authenticity and called it “an opportunity to reconnect” with the cable company."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Facebook’s latest effort to curtail leaks immediately leaked:

Facebook is ramping up its fight against leakers following the disclosures of whistleblower Frances Haugen. According to The New York Times, Facebook is limiting access to some internal groups that deal with “sensitive” issues like safety and elections. That the change, which was made to prevent further leaks, immediately leaked is both highly amusing and emblematic of some of the bigger issues the company is currently facing.

Ever since Haugen revealed herself as the whistleblower, one of the more noteworthy aspects of her story is that the documents she provided to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission were widely accessible to employees. The documents included slides detailing the company’s research into teen mental health, as well as numerous memos about how the company has handled rules for VIPs, misinformation and other thorny issues.

[...] But now the social network is moving away from that openness. The company is making some internal groups private, and will remove employees “whose work isn’t related to safety and security,” according to the report. “Sensitive Integrity discussions will happen in closed, curated forums in the future,” the company told employees in a memo.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China's lunar rock samples show lava flowed on the moon 2 billion years ago:

Lava oozed across the moon's surface just 2 billion years ago, bits of lunar rocks retrieved by China's Chang'e-5 mission reveal.

A chemical analysis of the volcanic rocks confirms that the moon remained volcanically active far longer that its size would suggest possible, researchers report online October 7 in Science.

Chang'e-5 is the first mission to retrieve lunar rocks and return them to Earth in over 40 years (SN: 12/1/20). An international group of researchers found that the rocks formed 2 billion years ago, around when multicellular life first evolved on Earth. That makes them the youngest moon rocks ever collected, says study coauthor Carolyn Crow, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The moon formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Lunar rocks from the Apollo and Soviet missions of the late 1960s and 70s revealed that volcanism on the moon was commonplace for the first billion or so years of its existence, with flows lasting for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years.

upstart writes:

7-Eleven breached customer privacy by collecting facial imagery without consent:

In Australia, the country's information commissioner has found that 7-Eleven breached customers' privacy by collecting their sensitive biometric information without adequate notice or consent.

From June 2020 to August 2021, 7-Eleven conducted surveys that required customers to fill out information on tablets with built-in cameras. These tablets, which were installed in 700 stores, captured customers' facial images at two points during the survey-taking process -- when the individual first engaged with the tablet, and after they completed the survey.

After becoming aware of this activity in July last year, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) commended an investigation into 7-Eleven's survey.

During the investigation [PDF], the OAIC found 7-Eleven stored the facial images on tablets for around 20 seconds before uploading them to a secure server hosted in Australia within the Microsoft Azure infrastructure. The facial images were then retained on the server, as an algorithmic representation, for seven days to allow 7-Eleven to identify and correct any issues, and reprocess survey responses, the convenience store giant claimed.

The facial images were uploaded to the server as algorithmic representations, or "faceprints", that were then compared with other faceprints to exclude responses that 7-Eleven believed may not be genuine.

7-Eleven also used the personal information to understand the demographic profile of customers who completed the survey, the OAIC said.

[...] 7-Eleven has also been ordered to destroy all the faceprints it collected.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Uh Oh, They Strapped a Sniper Rifle to a Robot Dog:

For years, we've been warning that it was only a matter of time — and now, the inevitable has happened.

Somebody strapped an honest-to-god sniper rifle to the back of a quadrupedal robot dog.

An image shared on Twitter by military robot maker Ghost Robotics shows the terrifying contraption in all its dystopian glory.

Latest lethality 6.5 #creedmoor sniper payload from @SWORDINT. Check out the latest partner payloads @AUSAorg Wash DC. Keeping US and allied #sof #warfighter equipped with the latest innovations. @USSOCOM #defense #defence #NationalSecurity #drone #robotics pic.twitter.com/Dvk6OvL3Bu

— Ghost Robotics (@Ghost_Robotics) October 11, 2021

[...] There's a lot we don't know about the machine, but according to an Instagram post by Sword International, a gun manufacturer, the machine is called the SPUR or Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle.

More at the Sword's website [Ed Comment: Link is sometimes giving 404 since this story was released--JR].

Original Submission