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owl draws our attention to the following:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

IRVINE, Calif. (Oct. 19, 2021) Software Freedom Conservancy announced today it has filed a lawsuit against Vizio Inc. for what it calls repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL).

The lawsuit alleges that Vizio’s TV products, built on its SmartCast system, contain software that Vizio unfairly appropriated from a community of developers who intended consumers to have very specific rights to modify, improve, share, and reinstall modified versions of the software.

The GPL is a copyleft license that ensures end users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software. Copyleft is a kind of software licensing that leverages the restrictions of copyright, but with the intent to promote sharing (using copyright licensing to freely use and repair software).

Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology, is filing the lawsuit as the purchaser of a product which has copylefted code. This approach makes it the first legal case that focuses on the rights of individual consumers as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.

[...] According to Sandler, the organization first raised the issue of non-compliance with the GPL with Vizio in August 2018. After a year of diplomatic attempts to work with the company, it was not only still refusing to comply, but stopped responding to inquiries altogether as of January 2020.

The "and install" clause implies that the infringing software would be GPLv3, rather than GPLv2. LWN carry the story here, including a link to the complaint itself which refers only to GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 violations. I wonder if they're overstating their case? (Installing being the "tivoisation" issue that caused GPLv3 to be created in the first place.) What really matters is what is said in court, not what's written in their press release. -- Ed.

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upstart writes:

More than 99.9% of studies agree: Humans caused climate change:

More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.

The research updates a similar 2013 paper revealing that 97% of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate. The current survey examines the literature published from 2012 to November 2020 to explore whether the consensus has changed.

“We are virtually certain that the consensus is well over 99% now and that it’s pretty much case closed for any meaningful public conversation about the reality of human-caused climate change,” said Mark Lynas, a visiting fellow at the Alliance for Science and the paper’s first author.

“It's critical to acknowledge the principal role of greenhouse gas emissions so that we can rapidly mobilize new solutions, since we are already witnessing in real time the devastating impacts of climate related disasters on businesses, people and the economy,” said Benjamin Houlton, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a co-author of the study, “Greater than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in the Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature,” which published Oct. 19 in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Journal Reference:
Mark Lynas, Benjamin Z Houlton, and Simon Perry. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, Environmental Research Letters (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966)

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upstart writes:

Tom Morey, inventor of the Boogie Board, dies at 86:

Morey grew up in Laguna Beach, Calif., where he started surfing and became one of the area's most notable surfers of the '50s and '60s. Morey attended the University of Southern California, where he studied music before switching to mathematics and graduating in 1957, according to The Washington Post.

Using his degree, Morey went to work for Douglas Aircraft as an engineer but left to start his own surf shop in 1964, according to the Post. By this time Morey had already begun experimenting with surfboard designs.

But it wasn't until Morey left Southern California that he created the first Boogie board. In 1971, Morey was living in Hawaii when he cut a large piece of polyethylene foam in half. He then worked to shape the foam with an iron after putting pages of the Honolulu Advertiser on top. By the time he was done Morey had a short board with a mostly rectangular body and a rounded nose. It weighed around three pounds — a fraction of what traditional surfboards weighed at the time.

With his new creation in hand, Morey went to the beach to test it out.

"I could actually feel the wave through the board. On a surfboard, you're not feeling the nuance of the wave, but with my creation, I could feel everything," Morey said as he recounted his first ride to SurferToday.com.

[...] The Boogie name came from Morey's relationship with music and replaced the original name of S.N.A.K.E., short for side, navel, arm, knee, elbow.

[...] In 1977, Morey sold the Boogie Board name and company. Today its owned by the Wham O toy company. Because of the trademark, boards that are similar to Morey's invention are called bodyboards.

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upstart writes:

Scientists partially restore vision in legally blind people with the help of CRISPR Gene- Editing - OnePexel:

Recently Scientists were able to restore vision in legally blind patients through a gene-editing experiment. Many people who were part of this experiment were born with vision issues but are now able to see betterS[sic]

Seven patients volunteered for the experiment, wherein doctors modified their DNA by injecting a gene-editing CRISPR directly into the cells. Researchers revealed on Wednesday that patients with leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a severe form of vision impairment had their vision improved after the gene-editing therapy.

[...] Scientists had earlier used the tool to remove cells from bodies of patients, taking them to the lab for editing, and then infusing the modified cells into patients.

[...] Unlike gene-editing for other diseases, doctors infused the modified gene into the eye directly instead of in a petri dish. Until now, the patients received the CRISPR treatment only in one eye. The treatment will be extended to the other eye if all things go well.

Even then, the treatment did not repair vision for all. Doctors suspect this is due to insufficient dosage or due to too much vision damage.

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AnonTechie writes:

Alibaba Just Unveiled One of China’s Most Advanced Chips:

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. unveiled a new server chip that’s based on advanced 5-nanometer technology, marking a milestone in China’s pursuit of semiconductor self-sufficiency.

The Chinese tech giant’s newest chip is based on micro-architecture provided by the SoftBank Group Corp.-owned Arm Ltd., according to a statement Tuesday. Alibaba, which is holding its annual cloud summit in Hangzhou, said the silicon will be put to use in its own data centers in the “near future” and will not be sold commercially, at least for now.

With the pandemic fueling increasing demand for cloud services, tech giants worldwide are increasingly seeking ever-more powerful and energy efficient semiconductors to gain an edge. Alibaba’s server chip is one of the most advanced by a Chinese firm yet, as it joins global rivals like Amazon.com Inc. and Google in gradually replacing silicon from traditional chipmakers like Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. with products custom-designed for their data centers and workloads.

[...] Known as Yitian 710, the Arm-based server chip is the third semiconductor introduced by the e-commerce giant since 2019, following an artificial intelligence chip as well as one used for internet-of-things.

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owl writes:

https://petapixel.com/2021/10/19/traffic-camera-mistakes-woman-for-car-issues-ticket-to-car-owner/

Cameras with AI image recognition are found everywhere these days, from the smartphones in our pockets to factory floors. But whenever artificial “intelligence” is part of the equation, there’s a chance for hilarity to ensue.

The Daily Mail reports that a 54-year-old UK man named David Knight from Dorking, Surrey, recently received a £90 (~$125) fine. His offense: driving down a bus lane in the city of Bath 120 miles away.

He had not been driving down a bus lane in Bath, so Knight looked closer at the photographic evidence printed on the notice. He was surprised to find that it didn’t show his car at all, but rather a woman walking down the road.

[...] It turns out the traffic camera had mistaken the woman for a car due to her shirt, which had the word KNITTER across the front. Knight’s car has the license plate KN19TER, and it seems the woman’s bag strap caused the camera to see “KN19TER” as the “car’s” license plate.

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takyon writes:

Russ Kick, 'Rogue Transparency Activist,' Is Dead at 52

A self-described "rogue transparency activist" and "investigative archivist," Mr. Kick worked on his own, without institutional support, and posted his findings on his website. He initially called the site the Memory Hole, in honor of the disposal chute through which the authorities in George Orwell's "1984" destroyed embarrassing documents; it ultimately became Altgov2.org.

One of his most notable postings involved an internal Justice Department report, written in 2002, that criticized departmental efforts at diversity hiring. Officials released a heavily redacted version; Mr. Kick downloaded the report, highlighted the black redaction bars and deleted them, making the original text instantly visible.

He was among the first to post documents in full, including all 16,000 pages of the F.B.I.'s file on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (The agency had released only a fraction of them.)

"The work he was doing was phenomenal," David Cuillier, a University of Arizona professor who studies government transparency and public-records access, said in an interview. "He showed that anybody in this country could get public records out of the government, even when the government didn't want to give them out."

But Mr. Kick's life's work went way beyond digging up documents.

Skeptical by nature and mistrustful of authority, he also produced guides and books that punctured myths, with in-your-face titles like "50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know" (2003) and "You Are Being Lied To" (2001), updated in 2009 as "You Are Still Being Lied To."

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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?

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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.

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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)

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