SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers have long suspected a connection between information and the physical universe, with various paradoxes and thought experiments used to explore how or why information could be encoded in physical matter. The digital age propelled this field of study, suggesting that solving these research questions could have tangible applications across multiple branches of physics and computing.

In AIP Advances, a University of Portsmouth researcher attempts to shed light on exactly how much of this information is out there and presents a numerical estimate for the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe—approximately 6 times 10 to the power of 80 bits of information. While not the first estimate of its kind, this study's approach relies on information theory.

[...] To produce the estimate, the author used Shannon's information theory to quantify the amount of information encoded in each elementary particle in the observable universe as 1.509 bits of information. Mathematician Claude Shannon, called the Father of the Digital Age because of his work in information theory, defined this method for quantifying information in 1948.

Phys.org

Does this take into account all the junk mail and spam?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sinclair Confirms Ransomware Attack That Disrupted TV Stations:

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns hundreds of local television stations across the U.S., confirmed Monday that it has suffered a ransomware attack. The incident is disrupting its advertising operations, among other things, and spread to many of its owned TV affiliates over the weekend, knocking local broadcast feeds off the air.

The cyberattack disrupted the company's general and office operations and resulted in data exfiltration, according to the media group's statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):

"On October 16, 2021, the company identified and began to investigate and take steps to contain a potential security incident. On October 17, 2021, the company identified that certain servers and workstations in its environment were encrypted with ransomware, and that certain office and operational networks were disrupted."

Sinclair is "actively managing" the fallout from the attack, it said, after implementing its incident-response plan. "The forensic investigation remains ongoing," it added, explaining that it's dealing with continuing disruption, including problems with provisioning local commercials at its TV stations.

"Modern ransomware actors have learned to target an organization's critical business systems as these need to be back online quickly and one of the easiest ways is to pay the ransom to obtain the key to decrypt those systems," Jon Clay, vice president of threat intelligence at Trend Micro, said via email. "In this situation, targeting customers of the victim (local advertisers) by taking their revenue opportunities away could ensure the ransom is paid in order to get these systems back online quickly."

Many of Sinclair's 294 television stations took to Twitter on Sunday to let viewers know that they were experiencing technical difficulties – preventing their ability to provide local programming like news and other broadcast content like in-market NFL games.

Also at BleepingComputer, who added the following update:

Update October 18, 09:00 EST: Sinclair Broadcast Group has confirmed that it was hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend [press release, SEC filing]. Sinclair also said attackers have also stolen data from the company's network.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Expansion of wind and solar power too slow to stop climate change:

The production of renewable energy is increasing every year. But after analyzing the growth rates of wind and solar power in 60 countries, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and Lund University in Sweden and Central European University in Vienna, Austria, conclude that virtually no country is moving sufficiently fast enough to avoid global warming of 1.5°C or even 2°C.

"This is the first time that the maximum growth rate in individual countries has been accurately measured, and it shows the enormous scale of the challenge of replacing traditional energy sources with renewables, as well as the need to explore diverse technologies and scenarios," says Jessica Jewell, Associate Professor of Energy Transitions at Chalmers University of Technology.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified energy scenarios compatible with keeping global warming under 1.5°C or 2°C. Most of these scenarios envision very rapid growth of renewable electricity: on average about 1.4 percent of total global electricity supply per year for both wind and solar power, and more than 3 percent in more ambitious solar power scenarios. But the researchers' new findings show that achieving such rapid growth has so far only been possible for a few countries.

Freeman writes:

Lucy’s solar panel hasn’t latched:

NASA's Lucy spacecraft launched safely into space early on Saturday morning from Florida, but after the deployment of its two large solar arrays, one of them failed to latch properly.

Combined, the two solar arrays have a collecting area of 51 square meters. Such large arrays are necessary because the spacecraft will spend much of its 12-year journey about five times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Lucy's solar panels can only generate about 3 percent of the energy at a Jovian distance than they can at Earth's orbit around the Sun.

[...] "In the current spacecraft attitude, Lucy can continue to operate with no threat to its health and safety," the agency said in a blog post. But it is not yet clear how the latching issue will affect long-term operations and maneuvering of the 1.5-ton spacecraft.

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/143

"Researchers pursuing an unconventional view of cosmology that dispenses with dark matter have developed a model that can match observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the leftover glow of the big bang [1]. This dark-matter-free model is an extension of the so-called MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) theory, which assumes that the gravitational force on galaxy scales is different from the standard Newtonian force. Previous MOND-based models could not reproduce the CMB. The researchers say that their model can be further tested with observations of galaxy clusters and gravitational waves."

The MOND theory was devised more than 30 years ago as a way to explain galactic rotation data without invoking the existence of the mysterious dark matter [2]. MOND proponents offered an alternative mystery in which the gravitational force changes for accelerations smaller than a threshold of 10⁻¹⁰m/s². The idea did not spring from any underlying theory, but surprisingly, the same acceleration threshold works for nearly all galaxies—small and large, young and old.

The main reason that dark matter has been favored over MOND is that dark matter is consistent with a much larger range of astrophysical observations. For example, dark matter can explain galaxies' bending of light from distant sources (gravitational lensing), whereas MOND in its initial form could not. Researchers have devised so-called relativistic MOND models that can fit the lensing observations [3], but until now, none of these revised versions of the theory were able to reproduce CMB data. "If the theory can't do that, then it's not worth considering further," says Constantinos Skordis from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

The APS Physics article is a review of this paper:
C. Skordis and T. Złośnik, “New relativistic theory for modified Newtonian dynamics” Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 161302 (2021).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA planet-hunting satellite discovers a dying star 'switching on and off':

Deep within the cosmos, a fading star's quiet death was sharply interrupted. Instead of gracefully vanishing into the heavy darkness of space, as stars typically do, it coughed out a mysterious, prolonged flicker of light.

This "has never been seen in other accreting white dwarfs," Simone Scaringi, an astronomer at Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "It appears to be switching on and off." Scaringi is lead author of a study on the star published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Every iridescent star that decorates our universe -- and those yet to add to the glittering collection -- will one day disappear. Slowly but surely, their luster, fueled by heaps of hydrogen gas, will dwindle as the supply runs out. Entering their final stages of life, they will become white dwarfs.

And NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, caught a unique glimpse of this particular white dwarf's strange behavior. The dying star is part of the two-star system dubbed TW Pictoris, located 1,400 light-years away.

upstart writes:

Sim City for food science takes on Listeria outbreaks:

Listeriosis, an infection caused by eating food contaminated by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, causes approximately 260 deaths and 1,600 infections each year. If certain foods aren't pasteurized, cooked thoroughly enough or washed properly, the bacteria can take hold and cause severe illness, including brain infections.

In a new study, the researchers developed a "digital twin" of two fresh-cut produce facilities, using these digital models to identify the optimal times and locations to look for the bacteria's presence and therefore prevent food contamination.

[...] The researchers' model provides a novel way for food safety managers to first visualize microbial contamination risks and patterns in their operations, and then to experiment with different environmental sampling practices, such as collecting sponge samples from different pieces of equipment.

Because of the complexity of these facilities, experimenting in the actual environment is not always practical, and by using a digital twin, each facility can personalize its unique features. "For example, in the two facilities we modeled in this study, we wanted to find when sampling certain types of locations would be more beneficial than sampling random locations, and vice versa," Ivanek said.

Journal Reference:
Genevieve Sullivan, Claire Zoellner, Martin Wiedmann, and Renata Ivanek. In Silico Models for Design and Optimization of Science-Based Listeria Environmental Monitoring Programs in Fresh-Cut Produce Facilities Applied and Environmental Microbiology [open], (DOI: 10.1128/AEM.00799-21)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Windows 11 hardware requirements made a mockery of by an Intel Pentium 4 processor

As the screenshots below show, Microsoft considers the Intel Pentium 4 661 a supported processor. Intel released the Pentium 4 661 in early 2006, with a solitary core to its name. Apparently, Microsoft forgot to add any Intel Family 15 (Netburst) SKUs in its unsupported processors list for Windows 11.

Hence, the PC Health Check tool sees that the Pentium 4 661 has a 3.6 GHz boost clock, which satisfies one of Windows 11's requirements. Curiously, the tool states that the Pentium 4 661 has two or more cores, even though it lists it as having one.

@Carlos_SM1995 has even got Windows 11 (Build 22000.258) running on a Pentium 4 661. Supposedly, Windows Update still works too, highlighting the ridiculousness of Microsoft's overtures regarding Windows 11 compatibility.

Windows 11 final (Build 22000.258) running on Intel Pentium 4 (11m4s video)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple has announced two new Arm SoCs for its upcoming MacBook Pro laptops. Both share the same CPU, but differ in GPU and RAM size.

The Apple M1 SoC for Macs has 8 CPU cores: 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The newly announced M1 Pro and M1 Max have 10 cores: 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores. CPU performance (multi-threaded) is about 70% faster, at around a 30 Watt TDP (M1 Pro) instead of 15 Watts for the M1. The 16-core "neural engine" with 11 TOPS of machine learning performance is unchanged from the M1.

While the M1 has an (up to) 8-core GPU with 2.6 TFLOPS FP32 of performance, the M1 Pro doubles that to 16 cores and 5.2 TFLOPS, and the M1 Max doubles it again to 32 cores and 10.4 TFLOPS. The M1 Pro is comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti discrete laptop GPU, while the M1 Max is comparable to an RTX 3080 laptop GPU. These levels of performance are achieved at around 30 Watts for the M1 Pro and 60 Watts for the M1 Max, compared to around 100-160 Watts for laptops with discrete graphics.

The M1 Pro has around 33.7 billion transistors fabbed on TSMC "5nm" in a 245 mm² die space, while the M1 Max has 57 billion transistors at 432 mm². The M1 Pro will include up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and the M1 Max will include up to 64 GB.

Also at Wccftech.

See also: Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up

Previously: Apple Has Built its Own Mac Graphics Processors
Apple Claims that its M1 SoC for ARM-Based Macs Uses the World's Fastest CPU Core
Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
Why is Apple's M1 Chip So Fast?
ARM-Based Mac Pro Could Have 32+ Cores
Booting Linux and Sideloading Apps on M1 Macs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Credit card PINs can be guessed even when covering the ATM pad:

Researchers have proven it's possible to train a special-purpose deep-learning algorithm that can guess 4-digit card PINs 41% of the time, even if the victim is covering the pad with their hands.

The attack requires the setting up of a replica of the target ATM because training the algorithm for the specific dimensions and key spacing of the different PIN pads is crucially important.

Next, the machine-learning model is trained to recognize pad presses and assign specific probabilities on a set of guesses, using video of people typing PINs on the ATM pad.

[...] This experiment proves that covering the PIN pad with the other hand is not sufficient to defend against deep learning-based attacks, but thankfully, there are some countermeasures you can deploy.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Password Auditing Tool L0phtCrack Released as Open Source:

The password auditing and recovery tool L0phtCrack is now open source and the project is looking for both maintainers and contributors.

First released in 1997, L0phtCrack can be used to test password strength and recover lost Windows passwords via dictionary, brute-force, and other types of attacks.

L0phtCrack was originally developed by Peiter Zatko, also known as Mudge, of the L0pht hacker think tank. L0pth [sic - L0pht] then merged with @stake, which was acquired by Symantec in 2004. It was owned by Symantec between 2004 and 2009, when it was acquired from the cybersecurity firm by Zatko and other original authors. By that time, Symantec had stopped selling the tool.

Terahash announced buying L0phtCrack in 2020, but it was repossessed in July 2021 after Terahash defaulted on its instalment sale loan.

When the announcement was made in July, its owners said L0phtCrack would no longer be sold or supported.

[...] The L0phtCrack source code is available on GitLab.

Original Submission

Facebook investing millions in vr internet replacement

looorg writes:

Facebook plans to hire 10,000 people in the EU to build its vision for a 'metaverse'. Facebook said it plans to create 10,000 highly-skilled jobs in the EU over the next five years. The recruitment drive is part of Facebook's ambition to create a digital world known as the "metaverse." A number of other companies, including Microsoft, Roblox and Epic are investing in their own versions of a metaverse.

The "metaverse" is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you. You'll be able to hang out with friends, work, play, learn, shop, create and more. It's not necessarily about spending more time online — it's about making the time you do spend online more meaningful.

The metaverse isn't a single product one company can build alone. Just like the internet, the metaverse exists whether Facebook is there or not. And it won't be built overnight. Many of these products will only be fully realized in the next 10-15 years. While that's frustrating for those of us eager to dive right in, it gives us time to ask the difficult questions about how they should be built.

So the next internet, a VR-nightmare. One of many.

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/building-the-metaverse-responsibly/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/17/facebook-to-create-10000-jobs-in-eu-for-metaverse-vision.html
https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/facebook/157854-what-is-facebook-metaverse-the-potential-future-of-the-internet-explained

Freeman writes:

Best Buy’s new $200/yr membership locks PS5, hot holiday items behind sign-up"

If you're still searching for a PS5 and are a Best Buy customer, your ship may have just come in—that is, if you're willing to spend an extra $200 a year for access.

That's because the big-box electronics retailer is locking stock of in-demand holiday items like Sony's console behind membership of its new Totaltech program. The expensive customer service package was recently rolled out nationwide.

The $200 annual service—which has benefits like round-the-clock tech support, up to two years of protection on Best Buy purchases (including AppleCare+ insurance, which can cost $200 on its own), and member discounted prices—is throwing in exclusive access to "the season's hardest-to-find products" as a bonus perk for the holidays, the company said in a statement. The Best Buy retail site had the $500 disc drive model PS5s available for Totaltech members to buy Monday morning, with the consoles gated behind an "exclusive access event" paywall. Instead of selling out instantly, its stock lasted between 90 minutes and two hours—a relatively glacial sales pace compared to the insane demand for the hardware that consumers have faced since it hit stores last November.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Treasury defends IRS plan to track most bank accounts:

The Treasury is defending its proposal to track banking information for nearly all Americans, after pushback from the finance industry and Congressional Republicans made the proposal a subject of heated debate in Congress.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that tracking a small amount of information for nearly every bank account in the U.S. would help the IRS spot high-income people who are skipping out on taxes. Tracking the information would also provide additional verification that low-income workers are meeting their obligations.

The Treasury's proposal has been criticized for a cutoff that appears exceedingly low — just $600 in a bank account, or a single $600 purchase, would be enough to trigger disclosure of that account's existence, according to an initial plan released in May. It now seems likely that number will rise to $10,000. But the financial industry claims that small business owners and independent contractors would be caught in a "dragnet" of surveillance — rather than the wealthy.

"While the stated goal of this vast data collection is to uncover tax dodging by the wealthy, this proposal is not remotely targeted to that purpose or that population," the American Bankers Association and a coalition of business groups wrote last month.

However, according to a senior Treasury official, the reason for setting the cutoff at such a low amount is not to trap low-income earners but rather to block wealthy people from sidestepping scrutiny. That's because a high threshold for disclosure — say, $100,000 — could easily be avoided if wealthy people simply moved money between several smaller bank accounts. After all, it's not uncommon for one person to have multiple bank accounts.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Confused governor says looking at webpage's HTML is criminal hacking:

Gov. Mike Parson is sick and tired of all these sophisticated, no-good hackers and he's not going to take it any more. It's too bad the Missouri Republican has no idea what he's talking about.

During a Thursday press conference, the confused elected official lashed out at a journalist who reported a vulnerability in an official Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. The reporter, notably, waited until officials fixed the error before publishing the story. The flaw? The website apparently included teachers' Social Security numbers in the HTML.

"Though no private information was clearly visible nor searchable on any of the web pages, the newspaper found that teachers' Social Security numbers were contained in the HTML source code of the pages involved," reported the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Parson, who apparently has never heard of "view source," obliquely threatened the Post reporter with prosecution.

"The state is committing to bring to justice anyone who hacked our system and anyone who aided or encouraged them to do so — in accordance with what Missouri law allows AND requires," wrote Parson.

[... - plenty snipped - ...] Parson, in other words, has no idea what he's talking about.

canopic jug augments that with the following other sources:

Governor Mike Parson wishes that ctrl-u or f12 will become illegal. This was actually a breach of personal information, including SSANs, for over 100,000 people.

https://text.npr.org/1046124278
https://www.salon.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor-threatens-criminal-prosecution-of-reporter-found-security-flaw-in-state-site_partner/
https://itwire.com/security/missouri-goes-after-man-who-looked-at-source-code-on-state-site.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/missouri-governor-teacher-data-hacking-1242493/
https://coldstreams.com/2021/10/14/no-it-isnt-missouri-governor-says-viewing-html-source-code-containing-private-data-the-state-published-on-every-page-is-a-crime/
https://abc17news.com/news/missouri/2021/10/14/gov-parson-threatens-legal-action-against-reporter-who-exposed-flaw-on-state-education-departments-website/
https://heavy.com/news/gov-mike-parson-html-source-code-decoded-ssn/

Original Submission